| Allan Siegel via nettime-l on Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:11:09 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> Boomerang Blues / National-Popular |
Hello Brian, This is Good! Thanks and Keep On Pushin' allan On 31/10/2024 03:39, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
When times are tense, and there's nothing you can do about it, geeks and intellectuals obviously scroll another webpage and read another book. I am looking at one right now called "They're Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution." Available at your nearest library (genesis). Certainly I don't endorse this conservative dumpster-dive in recent history, but it's relatively well argued and the preface makes an interesting read. Particularly at this moment when we are shivering in our boots here in the USA and everyone in mainstream political science is suddenly recognizing a national-popular shift that is global in scope and has been underway for well over a decade. When they say popular, they're actually talking about the inchoate, aspirational expressiveness of people looking for a better pathway - not so far from movements for redistribution and social justice that you may have been involved in. When they say national they are talking about a full-on revival of the most traditional and heavily institutionalized container for packaging and functionalizing all that inchoate energy. Nationalism thrives on the self-protective instinct. Although you wouldn't guess it from the liberal press, one of the big griefs of the right wing in America, and definitely in this book, is against the brutal wars that happen to be going full-tilt right now. And yet the tariff war that the Orange Guy is talking about is the surest imaginable recipe for expanded global conflict, so I don't endorse that either. "Most crucially," these conservatives say, "critics of the national populist movement should realize that their political uprising didn't need to happen. It occurred because of the actions of the governing class, not despite their efforts. The elite had countless opportunities over the last three decades to signal to voters that they were listening to their concerns, that the current system could work toward their best interests, and that the global liberal agenda was worth protecting. " This is what many of us warned about during the alter-globalization movement: that the sudden, uber-confident restructuring of everything down to daily life and dreams would provoke a violent resentment against the elites, for their arrogance in unilaterally deciding the fate of everyone. 9/11 immediately proved it from the outside. Now both the arrogance and the resentment are on full display at the heart of empire. It's Polanyi's double movement, where the conservative backlash against the global market order becomes much worse than the real pathology it seeks to cure. Yes, I know that billionaire cabals pilot these shifts, I do follow that, but they are riding a tiger with its own intentions. The point is that the neoliberal free trade corporate networks paradigm has brought its opposite into being, nationalism as an ethos and a political project, with blinders and oppression baked in. Was this in the air 30 years ago? Actually my first text on nettime, called TNCS, pointed to the kind of right-wing populist resentment that neoliberal oligarchy was likely to provoke, because you could already see it at the time. Frankly, that text wasn't popular in the emergent anti-globo circles and I couldn't push that kind of critique out into the inchoate aspirations of the day, although I always referred back to Polanyi's double movement. Now it's no theory anymore, simply actuality. We have it full in the face. For an unvarnished Marxist take on national populism, check out Jamie Merchant's brilliant book, "Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline." I did read this one cover to cover. He shows you how the well-known pendulum between bourgeois liberalism and national-popular authoritarianism has swung in the past, and then he follows that process into the global social relations of capital right now, at the crisis moment. Particularly convincing is the analysis of generalized slow-growth as the motor of resentment in a system that banks only on expansion. Plus he's a Chicago guy who knows the street. Maybe you have to like this sort of literature, but if you do it's a grand-scale, precise and sobering take on the exact same thing the conservatives are talking about. The shit that's going down right now I mean. Cross your fingers because we could see a sudden implosion of liberalism, followed by a lot of dark unknown. solidarity, Brian
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