Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

cf all the 'progress' we've made, or the utopian vision of civil rights 'i have seen the mountaintop' etc., part of the reason Coates has struck such a chord is bc his POV is pretty insurgent on both the left and the right for taking a more pessimistic pov

americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general)

The right wing tries to do the same thing in America re: minorities, esp. African-Americans, but it usually blows up in their faces. (e.g. "Why do blacks keep voting for the Democrats that want to keep them on the plantation," etc.)

I'd be surprised if the public has become organically more racist than it was when successive Tory leaderships under Hague, Howard and Duncan Smith tried to turn general elections into referendums on immigration and got their hides tanned. We have had a massive economic crash and austerity programme, with political and press scapegoating, since.

I've been under the assumption for a while that at least some white people are undergoing an existential crisis about the fact that they might live to see themselves become a minority population. About which, I know, boo hoo, but I can see where that mindset might account for an uptick in racist sentiment.

In democracies, there is always some insecurity over minority status. Even rich people worry about the fact they're in a minority, which is what motivates them to spend so much money on politics and propagandize so fervently about how horrible it would be to raise the marginal tax rates on them.

Some of the strongest leave pockets were places that have next to no immigration and this stuff was further below the surface when non-existent migration was higher. There is a racist element to a lot of it and it was probably the single biggest issue for most voters but there is a lot more going on.

Non-white *

Some of the strongest leave pockets were places that have next to no immigration and this stuff was further below the surface when non-existent migration was higher. There is a racist element to a lot of it and it was probably the single biggest issue for most voters but there is a lot more going on.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Friday, June 24, 2016 1:13 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the most racist white ppl tend to live far away from nonwhite people, this is not a surprise

Or what I said like four posts earlier.

Durham, which was Tony Blair's area, voted leave. Doncaster, which was the last Labour leader Ed Miliband's constituency, voted leave by a huge margin. Places that will probably vote for the most pro-immigration of the two main parties forever more voted to leave. There has been a big swing to the far right in a lot of areas and both parties have actively courted the racist vote but if they wanted to vote for flat-out fascists they have had every opportunity to do so In the past. Farage, who has been the face of the leave campaign for much of the time, has repeatedly failed to get elected as an MP in some of the most deprived areas of the UK.

the most racist white ppl tend to live far away from nonwhite people, this is not a surprise

^^^ is this really a thing that needs to be restated

not that I am going to pretend to understand UK politics

It's pretty counterproductive to foreground frothing nativist racism, which does exist, and not look at the underlying economic issues that underpin hostility not just to immigration but to metropolitanism, 'experts' and politics in general.

ie

@ggreenwald
Maligning everyone who is dissatisfied with internationalist institutions as dumb & primitive is part of the cause.

Yr boy in 'wildly oversimplifying to make a point' shocka.

i guess people on your FB wall don't like Andy Borowitz then

1). Yes, it is unconstructive to treat people who disagree with you politically as if they're dumb rubes because you will never ever persuade anyone or find any middle ground with that approach (looking at you, Morbsy). 2) I'd be super interested to know how many 'leave'-ers had considered and nuanced objections about remaining with the EU vs. how many were just like '___ go home!' Guessing the former is a paltry number and that there isn't much overlap.

There's a fairly large constituency who just wanted to kick the political class in the nuts as well.

The area I live in voted to leave by a margin or two to one. It's 93% white British. You can write them off as unsalvageable if you like but at a local level, you can't outnumber them and they're always going to have a voice.

Alternatively, you can look at the history of the place, how the docks which were the main employer closed and the cluster of towns and cities became a warehouse for the economically marginalised pushed out of London when the slums came down and continued to be used to relocate the unemployed and 'problem families' away from parts of the country they were lowering the tone of, how the army took over as the core non-public-service employer , how entire streets that had served as social hubs were boarded up or turned into a string of threadbare charity shops and gambling outlets, how pockets have some of the best schools in the country and twenty minutes down the road there's a secondary where 94% of people fail to meet the government mandated benchmark of five GCSEs, how substance abuse became rife and was left largely unaddressed, etc, and ask why people might want to carve an ugly scratch in the political machine.

And this is basically a very decent place to live for a lot of people! You can commute into London at vast expense in 35 minutes if you are lucky enough to have a job there

If the response to the rise of a muscular right is 'some people are bad and let's just hope we outnumber them' rather than 'let's rethink how we distribute money and opportunities' we really are doomed.

i dont think saying race is central to this dynamic means that degree of expressed resentment doesn't change over time. it just means that they can pull that lever whenever they need to accomplish something

like, of course when economic security feels threatened ppl are more apt to respond but that state of racial resentment is a constant

People who say that members of the US White working class vote against their own economic self-interest need to read this

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/includes/kansasqjps06.pdf

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

i dont think saying race is central to this dynamic means that degree of expressed resentment doesn't change over time. it just means that they can pull that lever whenever they need to accomplish something

Underlying racial / national anxieties have always been there and unquestionably played a major role in a lot of individual decisions to leave. They have been manipulated by the press and by politicians to achieve exactly this result. Growing up in a hugely multicultural part of London, though, I do have to be optimistic that this stuff isn't terminal. It can be fought where the will to do so, and the economic circumstances, align.

(looking at you, Morbsy).

you mighta misspelled his name

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

― hamqueen (bamcquern), Friday, June 24, 2016 3:02 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well you can argue that white upper class people are voting against their interests on things like the environment or w/e but the point that white people vote against their interests in greater numbers than everyone else *to some degree* is true of the poor, too. but yes, in general, poor people are more apt to vote left

thanks for sharing that, bam. i hadn't seen it before and frank's book was tremendously influential on me when i first read it. this is pretty damning tho:

Even in 2004, after decades of increasingly widespread college education, the economic circumstances of whites without college degrees were not much different from those of America as a whole. Among those who voted, 40% had family incomes in excess of $60,000; and when offered the choice, more than half actually called themselves “middle class” rather than “working class.” Meanwhile, among working-class white voters who could even remotely be considered “poor” – those with incomes in the bottom third of the national income distribution – George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2004 was not 23 percentage points but less than two percentage points.

so really what we're talking about - at least regarding many of our most reactionary right-wing voters - is bourgeois counterrevolution, not false consciousness proletariat counter-productive revolution.

relevant (reposting from JCLC):

https://www.thenation.com/article/progressives-need-to-stop-ignoring-rural-communities/

I think it's worth stressing that outside of the fairly stable and confused old fashioned racist crew the referendum debate was about immigration rather than race, and while sometimes difference was dwelt upon (language especially) generally there's not been too much effort spent differentiating the majority of EU immigrants in terms of race, more just culture and sheer numbers. the racism is mostly saved for the non EU migrants who are ofc less white

also that link nakh posted about authoritarianism makes sense, although this mentality is still mysterious to me in many respects, especially how it develops and fixates on certain issues

well they're authoritarians they fixate on what they're told to

a lot of taboo fixation is about social cohesion in the same way authoritarianism is -- i found it much easier to understand conservative/reactionary impulses when i realized that a lot of it has to do w/ preserving a social body which in-and-of-itself is a worthwhile goal even if i feel most of the time that the tactics used to pursue it are too blunt + ultimately ineffective. like i don't think necessarily the authoritarian voter wants a dictator to make them feel safe bc it offloads the decision making - which often seems like the subtext of the 'authoritarian' argument. i think it's more that societies with heavily centralized, concentrated authority making and strong social obedience is inherently going to be a society w/ better cohesion and sense of collective self. that's the link to the social taboos - both in terms of literal health of the community (taboos against incest, excrement, violence) and symbolically (religion taboos, strange cultural practices that by their very existence bind their practitioners and make them distinct from neighboring tribes, etc).

But imagining the UK would want to remain in the common market, they'll have to accept the freedom of movement for workers, which means that Leave won't stop EU immigrants. Right? So if it's about immigrants, it's about non-white immigrants, no matter what they say.

Otm

But imagining the UK would want to remain in the common market, they'll have to accept the freedom of movement for workers, which means that Leave won't stop EU immigrants.

this is correct, but the leave campaign went to some lengths to obfuscate this fact, I'm sure that a lot of leave voters did not appreciate that this was the case. I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of leave voters are sincerely unhappy about immigration of white eastern europeans, this is not just a smokescreen to disguise racism against non-whites (it is also about non-white immigrants as well, of course, and the leave campaign made a big deal about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU and of refugees from the middle east)

seeing the vote as for a certain sort of nationalism makes the most sense to me, the idea of repatriating powers had a big emotive pull, even if people only cared about it wrt migration

a friend's gran told her she voted leave because there were too many bangladeshis in her area. the right wing haven't really focused on commonwealth or other international migration for a long time, they've been concentrating on the referendum for years. the infirm and delirious might conflate all migration, but to the extent that there's an emblem of perceived excess immigration it's the polish labourer - plumbers, builders, farm labourers in the east especially, which had the strongest leave vote - undercutting their british competitors, sending their money to family at home

the sense of nihilism comes in part from the fact that there has never been a plan. there have been two leave campaigns with different spokespeople and styles, covering all manner of different issues and with various visions, but it's untested waters, no one could say what was going to happen and yet still managed to disagree with each other. the vote wasn't about the future, it was about the present, a present which has been building up for years in headlines. why did i think the sun might be on the losing side?

the thing which struck me most about the vote was that you could get people voting leave out of contempt for the ideal of the benefits scrounging working class, as well getting working class people voting leave out of frustration, mistrust and resentment of whoever they perceived as elites.

the british political system is one of the most stable and long lived in the world and an exemplar of political decay. the westminster parliament has been in place for hundreds of years, has changed little since 1707 and i don't think i have a chance of outliving it. there is no constitution, no architect, the system has slowly congealed over hundreds of years, with no big occasion for reform. we are literally still ruled by barons. politics is disconnected, remote, unrepresentative and seen to be unresponsive. does this explain an irrational politics? can it be rationalised as stemming from a sense of desolation in much of the country, urban and industrial but also of communities, and of the sense of the loss of some harmonious national imaginary, unreal england? it's the sad nationalism of a country that sees signs of decline everywhere and has become supremely cynical and sometimes paranoid

it sounds more desperate written down

the party system has been fracturing for a while now, likely to be more on the way and a second scottish referendum was always on the cards, so there is something v empty about waving union jacks. the guy two doors down has taken his union jack flag down now, leaving just the flag of st george & I'd go take a photo of it stuck to window with rain but fuck it

this is correct, but the leave campaign went to some lengths to obfuscate this fact, I'm sure that a lot of leave voters did not appreciate that this was the case. I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of leave voters are sincerely unhappy about immigration of white eastern europeans, this is not just a smokescreen to disguise racism against non-whites (it is also about non-white immigrants as well, of course, and the leave campaign made a big deal about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU and of refugees from the middle east)

Yes, a lot of people who viewed this as a referendum on immigration will go nuts if they find out later on that free movement is the cost of doing business with the EU, particularly if the UK loses any influence on whether, idk, Serbia or Ukraine join in the future. However, along with the 'threat' of Turks, refugees and French-speaking North Africans, i think there has been a concerted effort to racialise Eastern European migration from the press that really kicked into gear when Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania joined - an effort to hint that Southern Europeans are not quite white enough, lots of stories about 'Albanian criminals', an effort to ramp up anti-Roma prejudice, etc.

was this article by Will Davies already linked to on the uk politics thread? goes into the nihilism discussed above, also the apparent paradox of areas that had benefited the most from EU investment seeing some of the strongest majorities for Leave etc:

http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit

why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

my really abbreviated explanation is because a healthy left wing doesn't trust hierarchy and its leaders reflect that

one thing that seems to particularly characterize leftist movements of yore is an active participation in a print culture - writing up manifestos, pamphlets, publishing newspapers, going door to door selling them, party members rising in stature partially on the basis of their success in a. understanding the ideology and b. selling it, literally sometimes on the streets. when the nazis came to power there was a whole left-wing printing press apparatus that they commandeered. so what is the equivalent to this in a contemporary era where basically literacy culture is dead and no one is buying pamphlets about communism from anyone anywhere and if they are they aren't reading them. maybe it was never particularly useful/successful (tho the radicalization of the army/navy + industry proletariat in post-tzar russia suggests that print culture did play an important role in recruitment / spreading the ideology), just something to pass the time?

I mean, there is still no end of communiques and manifestos, but they tend to be mostly distributed on the internet these days. Print zines, pamphlets, and radical small presses seem to have remained important to the anarchist left, at least in punk circles, but largely as a supplement to online communication.

where do most socialists congregate online?

Like, there are still infoshops in many cities, but I don't know how important they are to recruitment in particular.
Xp

my really abbreviated explanation is because a healthy left wing doesn't trust hierarchy and its leaders reflect that

yeah to (regretfully) paraphrase Frum, it's not necessarily a leadership problem on the Left, but the "followership"

That seems pretty decentralized to me: forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists, tumblr cliques, but there are probably other gathering places I'm not aware of.
Xp

(As a disclaimer, most of the demonstrations and activist projects I've been involved with over the last couple of years have been locally organized and somewhat disparate, so other ILXors can probably give you a more informed answer.)

lol socialists still have blogspot blogs

i was reading the start of gorky's 'mother' some months back, at the beginning of which a worker self-radicalizes himself by a program of study of radical literature, which makes him a fearsome disciplined figure to his family, and it definitely seemed like a characteristic trope of the times a la mordy's description above, but one that does not quite hold anymore.

i went to a union meeting years ago during a time when my campus grad students were trying to unionize with like electricians i think, and i actually had someone at the meeting encourage me to read something that went into an explanation of the nature of exploitation, etc.; it seemed very much like a throwback. and while there are still marx-reading groups aplenty (somewhat rebounding since the financial crisis/OWS imo), i have gotten the impression that at least the shared-doctrine/outlook-generating function those used to serve, whatever the leftist tendency toward anarchism or absolute egalitarianism, is no longer vital.

i mean you still have jerkoff right-wing aspirants out there reading their bibles, and the catholic classics, and the documents of the american founders, and von mieses, but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization. i know a political-theory guy from grad school who went through a phase of enthusiasm for radical cartography. basically i'm saying nothing is biblical enough to help center a print political culture on the left?

Capital, you'd think but maybe too dry?

yeah, i think that used to be it, but no longer is

i mean pick up a contemporary text in that vein and the first thing they'll do is twist themselves into pretzels justifying returning to marx or ignoring marx or setting marx right, but still, the idea that one really has to read marx to get off on the right foot in this lyfe is like, nonprevalent

why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

i'll contribute my best guess about that. I fear that left wing leadership in general believes quite strongly in the essential goodness of human nature. as a result, they consistently direct their narratives and appeals for support to our better side. they experience just enough success with this approach that they persist in it as their habitual mode of operation to a degree that no practical politician ever would.

to be fair, if left wing political leadership were to swing very far or very obviously away from their stated idealism they would risk alienating those who have responded most strongly to their idealistic positions and these are the people to whom they most directly owe their current position and power. this dynamic makes them vulnerable to the attack that they are out of touch with reality, or, if they have moved tentatively toward the center, the attack that they are 'mushy' or 'waffling'.

in practical terms, this has some explanatory power in regard to the successes of single issues in left wing politics. by isolating an issue it becomes easier to dissociate it from left wing politics as a whole, so that the center elements of the center-left coalition that eventually help the issue to succeed do not have to identify with broad left wing aims or tenets, but can address the issue on its individual merits. It is a variation of divide and conquer, dividing the center so that parts of it can be split off to form an ad hoc majority on that one issue.

but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization.

im not very smart or knowledgeable about this kind of thing, but i think this is a really insightful point. the post-marxist left is more or less founded on post-68 critical theory, but it's that same foundation which makes any actual program or sufficiently large coalition impossible to achieve (cf. deleuze's notion of an authentic leftism being devoid of content). and while im sympathetic to that deleuzian point it's also important to recognize that it is in no way a political point. this is the big failure and misunderstanding of a lot of critical theory on the left imo. there's no real politics in it at all--hence the massive and infuriating hyper-inflation of what counts as "political" thinking in a lot of current theoretical discourse. as a result the left devolves into the endlessly fragmenting forms of identity politics you see going on now and thus an "authentic leftism" becomes a kind of performance of absolute theoretical purity.