Re: <nettime> Ocular facts

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Why do the centrist parties fail?

In my view, the salient fact about the current electoral sequence in the US
is that the Republican base ditched its traditional orthodoxy in the years
2011-2016. They rose up with the Tea Party, they found a charismatic leader
and they transformed their political representatives to oppose the
neoliberal globalism of Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama. For sure,
they were manipulated to the hilt by big-money interests. What they
ultimately  got for their great transformation was a flight into multiple
violent fantasies with unpredictable real consequences. Nonetheless, the
Republican base did effect a radical change of course, and that change is
bringing them victory today.

The Democratic base has had no such success. Despite a string of major
social movements since 2011, we have been coopted by party leaders whose
only course correction has been to adopt a shifting mix of elite-college
identity politics and Trumpian rhetoric on borders and China. The single
left-of-center politician who actually laid out the challenges of the
twenty-first century, and made proposals to overcome them, was Bernie
Sanders. His campaigns were sabotaged by party elites, his ideas were used
to get the votes of unionists and progressives, then those ideas were
dumped in favor of yet more neoliberal globalism, this time with weapons.
No one was allowed to generate popular enthusiasm for anything beyond Joe
Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. The Democratic party is now so
terrified of any significant change that it proposes a senile old Cold
Warrior who is visibly unfit for the job as the only possible candidate for
president. Mainstream Democratic voters can't imagine anything else. They
remain captive of the fear that this isn't the 1990s anymore.

If Biden has a teleprompter, he will stand up (on a good day) and tell
viewers that he's making microscopic executive adjustments to the punitive
remains of the US welfare state, while saving democracy from Trump at home
and Hamas/Russia/China abroad. What he can't say is the obvious: By
propping up the failing twentieth-century world order, he is supporting the
national-capitalist drive toward war and devastating climate change. We're
supposed to vote for him (or Macron, or Scholz) because they're better than
the fascists. The reality is that they have created the fascist backlash
with the very policies they now want us to defend.

Underlying the failure of centrist parties such as the US Democrats, the
French Renaissance party or the German SDP, is another, far more troubling
question: Is there any political response to neoliberal globalism that does
not lead to racist/nationalist delirium?

Until someone tries, we will never know the answer. Until we demand that
someone try, we will never even know the question.

The problem with sticking your head in the sand is that the desert wind
ultimately blows it away.
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