#(aggressively points to the shibboleth) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spiders-hth-is-an-outlier · 4 years

Text

Four Reasons You Can Pry Cass Out of My Cold Dead Hands

Look, I kept my mouth shut for like three goddamn years of Tumblr. That’s a lot, for me. I’m not famous for keeping my mouth shut, so, you know. Accept that I tried, and even though I failed, An Effort Was Made. Take that for whatever it’s worth.

Cass is the better spelling. It’s not just the correct spelling (though it is the correct spelling), it’s the superior choice of spelling, and here is why.

1. The Phonetics Are Good, Not Bad

You may see people point out that in English, single-syllable words with an A in the middle are typically pronounced with a short A sound. Bat, rad, van, pal. Cool, true! This would be a point, except that--

It’s typically NOT true of words that rhyme with, uh, Cass.

Now, there aren’t a ton of those words in English. One-syllable words with a short A sound and an S at the end are relatively rare! Which is cool, because we can pretty much look at all of them, ready, here we go:

ass -- bass -- brass -- class -- crass -- gas -- glass -- grass -- lass -- mass -- pass -- sass

What do you notice?

Sure, I’ll give you “gas.” It’s short for gasoline, and nobody ever bothered to add an extra S to make it match the pattern. So there you go.

But now take the second S off of every other one of those words. Usually you get a word that doesn’t exist in English, with the exception of “as” and “bras” (if you’re allowing plurals into the conversation). But of those two exceptions, now *neither one* rhymes with Cass anymore -- either the consonant sound changes to a Z sound, or the vowel becomes that soft ah instead of a short A. That’s what Kripke was trying to say when he says he picked the spelling because “Cas might sound like Caz.” He meant that, reasonably enough, people might be prompted to think of the only other one-syllable word in common use English that matches this pattern, which is ass/as.

But what about the other words? If you drop the second S and allow people to *guess* how they think the word might be pronounced -- well, who’s to say. Would you automatically rhyme bas, clas, glas, las, and mas with gas? Maybe you would. More likely, in my opinion, your best guess would be to either rhyme them with as, or to pronounce them as the non-English words they are -- bas relief is from a French loan, glas is Irish, las and mas are common Spanish words. None of them are pronounced with a short A.

So yeah, if you were randomly reading a fantasy novel, as a native English speaker, these are the calculations you’d make about how to pronounce a name: Das would sound more like dahz, I bet, while Dass is definitely dass. Vas and Vass. Ras and Rass. Shas and Shass. You don’t look at those and pronounce them the same way in your head; not if you’re an English speaker. You just don’t. And without the cue of knowing the full name, you wouldn’t for Cas and Cass, either.

2. Cass Is a Human Name, and We Call That Themes

Cass is a real, live name. People have it. The majority of them are women, and it’s short for Cassandra, sure, but it’s also a real, live, human male name. Really! Here’s a list of people who have that name in real life and fiction alike. For some of them, it’s a diminutive of single-S names like Caspar and Casimir. That’s a thing! Sometimes it’s just a freestanding name; Cass Ballenger the politician just had it as his middle name. Sometimes it does come from double-S names like Cassian and Cassius. Regardless, it’s just -- a name that exists.

When you name a fictional character, sometimes you just pick one randomly, but sometimes the name reflects on or points up something thematically. I have no idea if that was the intention in this case, but even if it was accidentally, something pretty cool happened. The made-up fantasy-faux-angelic name “Castiel” tends to be used by other angels, particularly ones like Raphael and Naomi who are speaking to him as real or presumptive superiors in a hierarchy. “Castiel” is the designation he was given out of the gate, when he was made to be God’s enforcer. “Cass” is the name Dean gave him. Cass is what his friends call him, and it’s symbolic of his relationship to humanity, which he consistently chooses over his relationship with angels. When he fell, or jumped ship, or however you’d like to think about it, he was given a human name, which everyone who regards him with even the slightest affection at all now uses. It’s good! That’s good! It’s a good use of a small thing to point up how differently different characters see him, and whether they emphasize his familiarity or his alienness. You lose that if you insist that his name is only an abbreviated form of his given name. You lose something from the text if you imagine he’s being called Castiel-only-shorter, instead of becoming a real person named Cass.

3. Just Don’t Be A Jerk, People Are Named What They’re Named

This is just, like -- decency? I know he’s not a real person, but it’s -- rude, right? You don’t correct the spelling of someone else’s name. Who does that? Do you have beef with parents who call their daughter Catherine Katie, because only Catie is acceptable to you? People are allowed to just do, like, whatever with names, it’s literally fine. You know what’s not typically a nickname for Dimitri? MISHA. But that’s his name, because it just is.

Yeah, it’s fandom. You can change whatever you like. You can have whatever opinions you want about how you would have spelled it, if you were Eric Kripke, or Chuck Shurley, or Metatron, or Dean Winchester. I have opinions about Isaac Lahey’s name in Teen Wolf, because it’s spelled Lahey and pronounced Leahy, and that’s bonkers! But that is how it’s spelled, and I just -- go on with my life, unharmed. Castiel isn’t a real person who will have real feelings about however you prefer to spell his name.

But the standard rule for polite society in re: how to spell someone’s name is however they want you to spell it. Normally not obeying that rule reads as passive-aggressive at best. Which is how we come to....

4. Fandom Gatekeeping Is Shitty, Actually

The reality behind the fervor with which Cas-people not just defend their choice to use the non-canonical spelling, but regularly flood my goddamn dash with weird, angry screeds about the fact that 100% of the world doesn’t use the non-canonical spelling, is that they are using it as a shibboleth, a marker of who counts and who doesn’t. Who belongs here and who doesn’t. I’ve always known this, because I’m clever like that, but recently I’ve seen versions of the Weird, Angry Screed that spell it out directly: people who spell it Cass are either new around here and haven’t learned How We Do It yet, or by choosing not to do it How We Do It, they are signaling their contempt for pro-Castiel fandom.

And honestly I understand that my reaction to this isn’t the typical one. I know that most people find those little signs and signifiers of who’s Team Us and who’s Team Them Over There to be comforting. There’s something that people just like about wearing the jersey; it makes them feel safe among others like them. I get it.

But much as I love fandom, there’s something I have always hated, and always will hate, about that kind of expectation of groupthink within fandom. I know, rationally, that part of the socialization is that you’re supposed to learn lingo and references and in-jokes -- you’re supposed to join the fandom by speaking like the fandom speaks. But there’s something, I dunno, almost threatening? There’s something crazy-making about taking this random, essentially irrelevant detail, and turning it into something that proves if you belong here or not. At best, maybe you’re “new around here” (which is okay? It’s fine, actually, to be new in a fandom and not yet realize that you’re supposed to be ignoring eleven seasons of subtitles? Why are you yelling at newbies, please don’t?), but at worst, we know because you won’t make this mental change that we’ve all agreed to make, that actually you’re not just an outsider, but an opponent. If you weren’t, you’d do what we all do.

It’s the most literal, direct example of fandom gatekeeping. If you know the secrets of how we speak and what we accept as real and important, then you’re cool and you can stay. If you don’t know, or you disagree with what we all got together and accepted as real and important, based on -- watching the show? -- then we know to stay away from you because you’re the wrong kind of fan. Not our kind. Wearing the bad jersey.

It’s shitty. It’s mean-spirited. It’s the worst kind of cliquish fan posturing, casting people with legitimately different approaches to how and why to use, change, or discard canon in their art and conversation as opponents in a dumb, made-up turf war, and it serves to intentionally carve the fan community into narrower slices of self-siloed echo chambers of agreement and validation, rather than requiring people to just -- get cool with the fact that different opinions exist.

Sure, not all people who spell it Cas are like that. Some of you seem nice. But man, I see the knives come out all over every time the Cass spelling pops up in canon, because a lot of y’all really take this seriously, beyond just habit and aesthetic preference. And even when it’s not said out loud, it’s clear to me that it’s not an argument about how the word looks on the page. It’s clear to me that those who won’t conform don’t belong and aren’t wanted, and people are afraid someone somewhere might not realize they don’t belong and aren’t wanted until they conform.

There was a time in my life when I’d find that really hurtful, honestly. That time is not now, because I have real problems, and what Supernatural fandom thinks of me really, truly, deeply does not matter to my life.

But it does bother me enough to write all this out, I guess, and I know that’s because I remember a time when I was younger and more isolated and fandom was really a social and emotional home for me, and I still have an idealistic fondness for the idea of a big-tent, non-gatekeepy version of fandom where people can just, like, be cool to each other about things, even things they disagree intensely about. There are still people in the world who need and deserve that, and it always angries me up a little when I see people deliberately wrecking that version and replacing it with one where fans have to performatively prove that they aren’t on the wrong team through weird little random tics that have to be repeated just-so, just the way you learned them. So I don’t do that, out of love for my imaginary version of fandom where no one’s asked to do that.

So yeah, the combination of those four factors means that I am never, ever, ever going to mend my ways on this topic, which is a privilege I have, as a person with basically nothing invested in anyone in Supernatural fandom. (I mean, some of y’all seem really nice, but none of my actual friends live here.) That lack of being invested in the fandom also, I realize, means that I have no social capital to spend, and people are unlikely to give a fuck what I do or why I do it, so all of this has really been -- basically meaningless. Still, I’m not really good at thinking things and not saying them, although I’m getting slightly better. Really! In general!

#apparently i have opinions

10 notes · View notes

arcticdementor · 5 years

Text

I was raised Christian.

When I was a teenager, I regularly attended church youth group. We did generic Christian things. We sat around and read milquetoast bible verses and then talked about how to be good people. We occasionally volunteered at charities. We played a bunch of party games. Generic fun things.

Then one day a new youth pastor started. This was a source of consternation for our church, as our church was an ethnic church and this pastor was not a member of our ethnicity. Still, we want to be openminded and she came highly recommended, so we let her start.

She turned some heads when she gave some sermons in church that pretty directly contracted our particular denomination's theology. I forget what the points were, but I mean these distinctions are just shibboleths and don't really matter. She was an outsider, so of course she wouldn't understand these things. It's not a big deal.

But then... our youth group started getting a bit more... radical.

First, she stopped teaching us Bible stories and started teaching us about history. Specifically, the history of activism. Gandhi, Mandela, and Martin Luther King. I should mention at this point that I am Canadian, and so all references to US race relations were completely foreign to us.

She started dropping these breadcrumbs, pointing out how all of these activists and movements only succeeded because of the power of the youth. About how we are the people with real power in the world to change things, if only we wanted to. You kids want real power, don't you?

I should mention now as well that my particular denomination of Christianity put an extremely high value on pacifism. Both pacifism as in a disavowal of violence, and pacifism as in a disavowal of activism. They believed in a very strict separation of church and state/politics, out of a fear that politics would taint the church.

Then, she started doing this weird new prayer technique. Previously, we would engage in silent, private prayers, as the church believed that each person's relationship with God was their own personal, private relationship, and it's none of anybody elses business. But now, what she had us doing, was that we would sit in a circle, she would turn off the lights, light some candles, put on some emotional ambient music, and encourage us to pray publicly. Prayers were encouraged to involve bearing our souls to God, talking about our sins and our fears.

In hindsight, I recognize this dynamic as being extremely similar to a Marxist struggle session. And, for the record, my referent for "Marxist struggle session" comes from a 60 year old friend who grew up in the Soviet Union, who was too smart and autistic for his own good, and who was on the receiving end of many such sessions. Told to me over beers straight from his mouth.

Finally, she started staging full on activist training in youth group. She taught us chants and we would practice protest chants while watching video of youth protests. She taught us techniques for engaging in 'non-violent protest' which included things like teaching us how to lie in front of stuff to block things off while making our bodies into deadweight, and getting into peoples face while shouting passive-aggressive things that were intimidating while being plausibly deniable.

It was at about this time that I had a mini freakout and stopped attending youth group. Not over any of the above, but rather because i was an aspergic kid with an overly literal understanding of the Bible and couldn't reconcile some dumb random doctrinal thing she said with my understanding of things.

A few weeks (months?) after I stopped attending, she was fired. Nobody ever talked about why.

In hindsight this is obvious: an honest to god Marxist activist tried to infiltrate our church and subvert the youth. She slowly turned our youth group from a glorified daycare/chaperoned hangout (which, despite being a church youth group, I would not characterize as 'indoctrination' at all; insofar as there was any religious content at all, most of the youth thought it was stupid, and to my knowledge every single person who attended those meetups are atheists now), to an activist indoctrination session. It happened slowly, so that it took a while for people to notice what was happening, and she did it to children (ages 12-16), who were not world-wise enough to understand what was going on. To be honest, to us it felt like she was rescuing us from the same boring old basic bitch party games and giving us some actual excitement.

Ever since realizing what happened there and reflecting on it, I've used this as my main point of reference regarding radicalization and indoctrination. This gives me a decent framework to compare generic 'teaching' of values (which I am ok with, regardless of what those values are) vs 'indoctrination', which causes knee-jerk horror for me. It's given me a reference to differentiate teaching vs indoctrination even between churches (there are definitely some scary churches out there engaging in indoctrination). It's also given me the ability to be able to look at non-religious groups, such as progressive youth clubs, to identify which of these are engaging in frightening indoctrination, and to be confident in my judgement calls.

—“GPoaS”

#quote #reddit #the motte #long quote #entryism #mennonite

9 notes · View notes

etirabys · 6 years

Text

there’s this thing on tumblr I’ve disliked for years but failed to articulate clearly, so I’m just going to gesture at it

it’s the ‘brand-ification’ of bisexuality – maybe queerness in general, but I notice it the most clearly with bisexuality. (I do not have examples handy – I aggressively scroll past any post that features more than trace amounts of this, and suspect I’d feel unwilling to link to them even if I did. Most posts starting with ‘bisexual culture is’ fit this bill.) It’s like this collective attempt to build a tribal identity around some aesthetics, patterns of attraction, and (weak?) shibboleths, and whenever I read something that is part of this attempt, I can feel myself resisting it

My main defense against this during college years was “well, I identify as straight, so this isn’t any of my business & I get to opt out of having to examine my criticisms of this”, but then I graduated & shortly start dating a woman, at which point it seems silly not to say I’m bisexual, and now this stuff actively annoys me again

#rambl

49 notes · View notes

schraubd · 6 years

Text

Zioness Has a "Manifesto"

Zioness -- a campaign for progressive Zionists launched in the wake of the Chicago Dyke March fiasco -- has a "manifesto". This perhaps offers an opportunity for me to share my thoughts on Zioness, which I've been observing since its initial inception and towards which I maintain a wary but not wholly antagonistic posture. Some people think that Zioness is just a false flag operation -- people who don't actually care about progressivism at all trying to infiltrate and kick-up-dust within progressive communities. There are several bases for this assertion. First, critics point out the links between Zioness' leadership and the Lawfare Project, which tends to take a relatively conservative line on Israel advocacy issues. Hence, they suggest that Zioness is really just a stalking horse for Lawfare's right-wing agenda. Second, some have claimed that Zioness has taken a confrontational posture towards the progressive groups it marches with that, it is alleged, is designed to provoke and sow division. This, the argument goes, militates against the interpretation that all they really want is inclusion. These arguments don't quite track for me, however. On the first point, there are, for better or for worse, plenty of Jews with non-progressive (even conservative) views on Israel who genuinely care about and support things like reproductive access, gay rights, economic redistribution, and other pillars of the progressive community. I'd be entirely unsurprised if the leaders of the Lawfare Project fit that profile. Call them inconsistent if you like, but I think there is little evidence to suggest they're lying about the cluster of beliefs they hold. And indeed, at least in the social media feed I've been pleasantly surprised at how Zioness has seemed to genuinely pick up and promote progressive causes in a way that feels organic and heartfelt. Groups or commenters that ignore, say, women's rights six days a week and then parachute in to say "what about women in Saudi Arabia?" whenever someone says a bad word about Israel are a dime a dozen. But Zioness has not actually been doing this -- it has promoted progressive causes in ways and in contexts where there is no clear reason to do it other than that they believe in it.

On the second, there's probably something to the claim that Zioness takes on a defiant tone that can be read as hostile. There's also probably something to the claim that people being open and unapologetic about their Zionism in spaces like this will be automatically read as "confrontational." Both of these interpretations, I think, make sense given the genealogy of Zioness as reaction to the expulsion of several Jewish marchers from the Chicago Dyke March for simply holding a rainbow flag with a Star of David on it -- an act which was taken to be sufficient proof of being an outside agitator who wasn't part of the progressive community. One lesson one can take from CDM is that being subdued in one's Jewishness, and adopting a go-along-get-along stance, isn't going to save you -- in fact, it isn't even going to protect you from accusations of tossing "Zionism" in everyone's face. Another lesson is the need to avoid the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic where Zionist are told not to be open in their Zionism when engaging in progressive causes (because it's distracting and making it "about us") and then, when progressive activists seek to define Zionists out of the camp it's justified (because where were all the Zionists during all these other campaigns?). So it doesn't surprise that the new tactic will be out-and-proud, taking a more aggressive and less conciliatory stance. To be clear: this sort of confrontational, disruptive presence is very definitively not my preference. It flies in the face of all my own political instincts. But I've written about how certain modalities of organizing and protesting serve as markers for progressive orientation -- the medium very much being part of the message -- and as much as I hate it there might come a point where it's necessary for more mainstream Jewish groups to pivot towards more confrontational methods of political advocacy that "code" as progressive. Put another way, there's something a bit odd about folks from the IfNotNow wing of Jewish political action complaining that another group is behaving in a disruptive and confrontational manner, and doesn't seem interested in quietly and unobtrusively talking things out without making a big stink in public. To the extent Zioness is confrontational in demanding inclusion, that's wholly consistent with, not in opposition to, speaking in progressive shibboleths. So those are reasons why I don't join the antagonistic camp. Yet I remain wary. And the main reason is that Zioness utterly refuses to even try to think through what progressive commitments mean with respect to Israel. If we return to the manifesto, for example, it's pretty vague on what Zioness actually wants to achieve in the world. Indeed, it tries to hold that vagueness out as a virtue: "We will not define your progressivism or your Zionism." But the fact of the matter is it gives very little guidance regarding what it means, in practice, to "dismantle institutionalized racism in our government and our society." What does that commit us to? What policies are and aren't compatible with that ambition? Most tellingly, Zioness doesn't seem willing to grapple with the fact that progressivism requires certain things out of Zionism. One can believe (and I do) that Zionism and progressivism are compatible while observing the should-be-obvious fact that not all iterations or implementations of Zionism are progressive or consistent with progressivism. Being a progressive Zionist imposes certain obligations with respect to Israel as much as anywhere else; a fact that Zioness seems resolutely uninterested in contending with (and here the link to the Lawfare Project really may do some important explanatory work). So while it claims that it wants to mobilize "progressive Zionists," that term doesn't actually encompass any set of "Zionist" beliefs about Israel so long as the holder is also pro-choice. The progressive Zionist community is already existent in organizations like Ameinu, Partners for a Progressive Israel, and J Street (to name a few), and all of these understand that progressive mobilization around Israel can't be agnostic on matters of Israeli policy or even the best understanding of Zionism. If, as I've often argued, caring about Israel means having opinions about it, these groups care a lot about Israel -- but that manifests precisely because they have particular concepts of what they want Israel to be and an active desire for it to live out a progressive credo. So ultimately, I remain wary. I've already got a progressive Zionist community that I'm comfortable with; it works through the organizations I've just mentioned and they seem to do it better than Zioness is currently capable of. And while I can't fully join the critique of Zioness for behaving in a confrontational, stand-up-and-notice-me sort of way since that mode of social activism is increasingly de rigueur on the left, I don't like it and I don't have any interest in joining it. via The Debate Link http://ift.tt/2s4kcIf

#activism #anti-semitism #Israel #Jews #progressives

4 notes · View notes

news-ase · 4 years

Text

0 notes

asoenews · 4 years

Text

0 notes

janebeez · 4 years

Text

0 notes

mineapolice · 4 years

Text

0 notes

libertariantaoist · 7 years

Link

WHY?

Years from now, when the history of this war is written, acres of print will be devoted to the question of the real cause (or causes) of the conflict: already, as we head into Day 37 of the crisis, the two big questions that loom in the minds of baffled Americans are: "Why Kosovo?" and "Why now?"

THE WASHINGTON FACTOR

NATO would naturally like us to believe that the Serbians, and specifically Slobodan Milosevic, started this war by cracking down on their Kosovar subjects; and that, furthermore, the Serbs are responsible for all the region's problems. Yet the complex history of the Balkans, with its Byzantine intrigues and unique intersections of politics, ethnicity, and religion, rules out this or any other mono-causal theory. Apart from a history rich with incident, in which the historical struggle of Serbs and Turkic invaders takes on the scale of an epic saga, outside factors have always played a decisive role in bring the Balkan cauldron to a boil. That is especially true this time around. In the era of American hegemony, what is happening in Washington, DC, the imperial capital, is at least as important to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia as what policies are being pursued in Belgrade – and, I would argue, more so.

NO ORDINARY EVIL

Why are we at war with Serbia? The primary causes of the war have little to do with anything that is now occurring (or said to be occurring) in the Balkans; nor is it a conspiracy of war profiteers, bound and determined to wring mega-profits out of the agony of the Serbian nation (although surely there are war profiteers aplenty, who are profiting from a war they naturally support). Some have pointed to the valuable mineral rescues under this much-disputed patch of territory; the war, they say, is motivated by greed. But mobilizing the military might of the nineteen NATO nations, not to mention the U.S., seems an awful lot of trouble to go through in order to acquire a few mines. Least credible of all is the theory of the "humanitarian" origins of this war: before the U.S. intervened, less than 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo, not all of them Kosovars but also many Serbs who died at the hands of a terroristic "Kosovo Liberation Army." American intervention has led to the exact opposite of its announced intent: instead of "saving" the Kosovars, U.S. meddling has worsened their pitiable condition, a result that was entirely predictable. No, none of these rather prosaic reasons really explain such a monstrous evil: such ordinary human motivations as greed, pride, compassion, and national feeling seem entirely too prosaic to explain why a six-year-old Serbian girl was killed, yesterday, in a NATO bombing raid that killed twenty people in her village and wiped out her entire family.

GLOBAL AGENDA

What killed her was ideology. Not the familiar ideological bogeymen said to haunt the Balkan landscape – which, as we all know, are xenophobia, racism, nationalism, and other extreme forms of political incorrectness – but a militant and deadly dangerous globalism that has entranced American elites in the post-Cold War world and hypnotized certain powerful politicians. With the death of Communism, the end of the conservative crusade against the masters of the Kremlin has caused many old Cold Warriors to cast about for new enemies to confront, new conspiracies to counter. Likewise on the Left, a new spirit of internationalism has revived an otherwise moribund domestic agenda, revitalizing such tired old bromides as "national purpose" and bringing back into vogue such phrases as "standing should-to shoulder" that have not been heard in liberal circles since the great antifascist struggle of the thirties and forties. The end of the Cold War, far from giving us a respite from international tensions, has infused these ideological warriors with a new martial spirit: in the absence of any competition, any great power to stand in our way, the world is ours to supervise and shape, and both the Left and the Right have their own global agendas, which in substance if not in style have much in common. They have come together over the issue of Kosovo: the Weekly Standard and the New Republic; internationalist conservatives and their liberal counterparts, each with their own distinct (but similar) views of how and why the U.S. must shoulder its sacred and indisputable responsibility as the Last Superpower.

PORTRAITS OF THE WAR PARTY: THE NEOCONS

On the Right, Kosovo is the latest cause of the neoconservatives, a sect that is small in numbers but hugely influential in the media and in Washington. The neoconservatives, or "neocons," have never amounted to more than a few dozen intellectuals and publicists, nearly all of whom seem to be newspaper columnists, magazine editors, and foundation officials. A high-powered bunch, many of them started out as militant anti-Stalinists who yet retained their socialist credentials (e.g. Sidney Hook) and wound up, twenty years later, in the camp of Ronald Reagan cheering on the Nicaraguan "contras." The domestic agenda of these political chameleons has changed with the circumstances of the moment: when liberalism was fashionable, they were liberals; when free-market shibboleths replaced liberal bromides as the conventional wisdom, these seekers after the main chance were suddenly "converted" to capitalism (as least enough to give it "two cheers"). From being advisors to Hubert Humphrey and "Scoop" Jackson, they went on to become the intellectual vanguard of the "Reagan Revolution." But none of these domestic issues really moved them, or occupied a central place in their political affections. What really got them going, however, was the issue of Communism, i.e., foreign policy, which was their ruling passion. Their views were shaped by an overwhelming desire to destroy their old enemies, the Stalinists, and evolved over the years into a reflexive bellicosity. The death of Communism did not even break their stride: they were on the job warmongering full-time weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, looking alternately at Islamic fundamentalism and the Chinese as potential stand-ins for the Kremlin. While most conservatives in Congress reacted to the intervention in Bosnia with something considerably less than enthusiasm, the Weekly Standard, house organ of the neocons, scolded and mocked the Republicans for their skepticism, accusing them of turning "isolationist." While disdaining any ostensibly humanitarian motives, for the neocons American intervention was and is a question of maintaining hegemony, not only in Europe but over the whole globe. Editor Bill Kristol has called for the United States to impose a "benevolent world hegemony" on the peoples of the earth, and urges America to drop the republican pretense and adopt a frankly imperial foreign policy. The globalism of the neocons is the old liberal internationalism dressed up in the self-consciously "tough" rhetoric of hard-nosed power politics: instead of the "We-are-the-World-we-are-the-children" internationalism of Ted Turner and the Clinton administration, editor Kristol defended the 1995 bombing of the Serbs in typically Cro-Magnon terms: "The Serbs do not put down their guns because they trust America will treat them fairly." wrote the Weekly Standard editors. "They do so because they know we sympathize with Bosnia, and they trust only that we will kick their skulls in if they break the peace."

A MOTLEY COLLECTION

For years, Kristol and his fellow neocons have been ceaselessly agitating for war against Serbia. Now that they have it, they are devoting entire issues of their subsidized magazines to justifying it and arguing for its escalation and expansion. The war, they admit, is "going badly," but this is due to Clinton's mismanagement, not to any inherent flaws in his policy. The problem is his irresoluteness, his character, which prevents him from doing the brave thing, and that is starting the ground war immediately. And if Clinton will not start the war on the ground in Kosovo quite yet, then the neocons have wasted no time in waging a war of words against those conservative Republicans who have become the antiwar opposition of the new millennium. They are, as the Weekly Standard put it, "a rather motley collection of neoisolationists who simply don't believe the United States should much concern itself with overseas matters not directly threatening the American homeland; of Clinton despisers who don't trust the administration to do any serious thing seriously . . . and of ultra-sophisticated 'realist' intellectuals who have divined that America has no interests in the Balkans and who claim that to combat Milosevic's aggression and brutality is merely to indulge in soft-headed liberal internationalism." The editors then roll out a long list of conservative stalwarts, all safely within the neocon orbit. How could crusty old Jean Kirkpatrick be described as "soft-headed"?

REALISM VERSUS SURREALISM

For the Weekly Standard to denounce "Clinton-despisers" is hypocrisy on such a scale that it defies quantification or even comprehension: after calling for his impeachment, week after week, and salivating over the dreary details of the President's peccadilloes, both personal and political, relentlessly and with mind-deadening monotony, to now hear from these very same people that we must follow our Commander-in-chief into battle without question or hesitation, would be funny if it weren't so monstrous. What kind of robots do they think conservatives are, that they can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch? As for these "ultra-sophisticated" intellectuals who champion "realism" – how "sophisticated" does one have to be to question the value of intervening in a Godforsaken backwater like the Balkans? And why not inject a note of realism into the fancy formulations of foreign policy theoreticians, who ceaselessly invent "new architectures" and enunciate grandiose policies that their sons and daughters will never be asked to die for? It is high time somebody did.

THE CLINTON-HATERS

The idea that conservatives are opposed to jumping into the Yugoslav quagmire because they cannot abide Bill Clinton is wishful thinking on the part of Bill Kristol and his neocon clique: this war has really isolated them from what they hoped was going to be their mass base in the GOP, and cut them off from the rank-and-file of the conservative movement, perhaps permanently and irrevocably. The rightist response to the new internationalism has been so violent and so intransigent that even National Review, that old war-horse of Cold War militarism and Anglophilic Atlanticism has been forced to acknowledge it. The current issue [May 3, 1999] contains two apologias for Clinton's war: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Andrew J. Bacevich bemoan Clinton's apparent unwillingness to kill enough civilians in the bombing campaign and urge the immediate dispatch of the 82nd Airborne into the streets of Belgrade. Michael Lind has taken time off from attacking the Christian Coalition and conservatives in general and is readmitted to the right-wing fold in time to add his endorsement to the need to unleash the Marines on Belgrade. But this issue also features two significant dissents, by Owen Harries (editor of The National Interest) and Mark Helperin (a novelist and a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal), whose eloquence and passion far outshines the pedestrian war-whoops that fill the rest of NR's pages. Harries is, one supposes, one of those "ultra-sophisticates" denounced by the Weekly Standard for the vulgarity of their nouveau realism. But Harries' elegant piece is not so easily dismissed. In terms of foreign policy, American ends, he argues, have always been contradicted by the means employed: the former are grandiose, the latter inadequate to the task. We got away with it for a while, because no one dared to challenge us: now, we have to put up or shut up. Although he never says so directly, one gets the distinct impression that Harries would rather have us shut up. His logic is impeccable: people never fight unless it is in their interest to do so, that is, unless they have to defend their homes and their way of life against some actual or perceived aggression. No such aggression or threat now exists: ergo, the Americans will not fight, and probably should not fight, for wider and more "idealistic" ends. Ripping aside the facade of "fakery," Harries makes the trenchant point that the Balkans, "properly considered . . . should be an insignificant backwater, and it has taken a good deal of determined, sustained political stupidity to make it otherwise." Harries also deconstructs the absurd propaganda device that equates Milosevic with Hitler: "The . . . characterization was nonsense, and, in typical Clinton fashion, we have heard no more about it since its initial trial run." We are not up against a militant totalitarianism, but Serbian nationalism, which, like the Vietnamese nationalism we fought unsuccessfully two and a half decades ago, has all the advantages: "We are militarily much stronger than our adversary, but he has much more at stake than we have." Aside from the political unsustainability of a high-casualty ground war, "the second argument against going in deeper is that in the end it may succeed and that this may be even more daunting than defeat. Because what does one do then?" The answer: occupy Belgrade and the whole region for the next fifty years.

THAT SERBONIAN BOG

After touching on the problem of our client, the KLA – do we really want to back a Marxist-oriented guerrilla group with ties to the Albanian mafia and the international drug trade? – and warning of "an unstable, truculent Russia that still possesses 20,000 nuclear warheads (which can be sold as well as used)" – Harries quotes John Milton's "Paradise Lost":

A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog Betwist Damiata and Mount Casius old, Where armies whole have sunk.

While Milton's geography may be dubious, his sense of Balkan history is sound; Harries exhorts us to reflect long and hard before we sink much deeper into the Serbonian bog.

A WARNING

In Helprin's piece ["A Fog That Descends From Above,"] the new internationalism faces an even more withering scorn: as the instrument of Albanian separatism, U.S. policy in the Balkans is a standing invitation to disaster. As for the broader policy implications of our sudden championing of the Kosovar cause, Helprin asks: "Shall we join with the Basques in their struggle, or the Catalans, the Chechens, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis?" And that is just the beginning: "If these do not suffice, Germanophones of the Alto-Adige would like very much to reattach themselves to Austria." The original purpose of NATO, to preserve the sovereignty of European nations against the centrifugal forces of secessionism and irredentism, has been not only nullified but inverted. In both the terrain and those will be defending it against an American assault, the difficulties are inherent and obvious: one has only to familiarize oneself with the Serbian national literature, replete with such titles as Into the Battle, South to Destiny, Reach to Eternity, and A Time of Death, and to remember that Tito's Partisans tied down 33 Axis divisions, to realize what we are up against in Serbia. "There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that an invasion to cover our miscalculations and elemental failings, and as an ally of radical ethnic Albanian separatism, and after a humanitarian crisis – that we provoked – has passed, is not worth the life of a single American." As for those who believe it is, they are "unduly generous with other people's sons."

A SWAGGERING JUNKER

While Helprin bring passion and historical context to his argument, Brzezinski and Bacevitch are sorely lacking in both departments. The former constructs thought-patterns of alarming circularity: we must intervene to save NATO and prevent America's "global leadership" from being fatally undermined, but nowhere states why NATO is an end in itself, or why we have to expand its original mission. Rather, this is assumed, as is the "devastation" a withdrawal from the Balkans would wreak on "global stability." Brzezinski berates Clinton for not moving swiftly enough to save the Kosovars, but fails to say what course of action would have saved them. We must "shock and intimidate" the Serbs with our bombing campaign, he coldly states, but only succeeds in shocking rather than convincing. There is a kind of Bismarckian arrogance in his jeremiad, an imperious tone that any native-born American can only find repulsive.The same swaggering bullying tone, more appropriate to a German Junker of the last century than an American of any century, permeates Brzezinki's nine-point ultimatum to the Serbs: independence for Kosovo (how is this in our national interest? No answer) – no negotiations – and no more targeting restrictions: it's bombs away, and to hell with those Rembrandts! "Let's get serious" – that's the title of this Machiavellian manifesto – and we must make our commitment "unambiguous and enduring." How long? Five, ten, twenty years – what about fifty? There is no mention of costs, nor is there any sense that this Great Statesman has any sense of the limits of American power. The theme of this essay, and of Bacevich's, is an insufferable hubris that virtually begs to be shot down. Here, for example, is Bacevich bloviating on the alleged incompetence of the Yugoslav military: "Indeed, to attribute to the Yugoslav armed forces more than a minimal ability to wage conventional war against modern, professional forces is to give them far more credit than they deserve. These are hooligans and gangsters, not trained and disciplined soldiers." I don't think a people fighting a defensive war on their own soil against overwhelming odds can be called hooligans and gangsters, no matter what their politics: and if I were Mr. Bacevich, I would not be so sure that such a people, with such a history, will crumble at the first sign of battle. At least they are fighting for something tangible – their national sovereignty and identity – as opposed to the pallid abstraction of NATO, or the even more nebulous "New World Order." The only Americans who believe that these are worth a single life are newspaper columnists, television talking heads, and thinktank policy wonks who wouldn't last very long on the battlefield.

THE NEOCONS: BACK TO THE LEFT?

Both National Review and the Weekly Standard invoke the names of the same Republican interventionists like a mantra: McCain, Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Bush and Dole II, etc. But they are clearly outnumbered, not only in the overwhelming opposition to this futile and destructive war among Republicans in Congress – as shown in the recent vote disavowing the air war and restricting the use of ground troops – but also among rank-and-file conservative Republicans, whose opposition is even more unequivocal. The recent convention of the California Republican Assembly, the conservative activist group within the state GOP, recently adopted a strong resolution against the war with virtually no debate. Opposition to this war is not even mildly controversial among conservatives, and Clinton has little to do with it: they would question it no matter who was leading us into this quagmire, and it is high time the War Party acknowledged it. In the post-Cold War world, conservatives instinctively look askance at military intervention; as the memory of Communism recedes, what Eliot Cohen calls the "ornithological miracle," the transformation of hawks into doves and vice versa, is inevitable and inexorable. Sooner or later, the militant interventionism and global do-goodism that attracted the neocons to the ranks of the Right will be totally expunged from the conservative movement, and they will be forced to go back – back to the militant, do-gooding, global-crusading Left from which they first emerged.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com

1 note · View note

shinelikethunder · 7 years

Text

One thing that gets lost in spaces where offense and grievance dictate social mores (so... the entire internet these days...) is that “this is offensive to Group X” isn’t a statement on the fundamental worth of what you’re saying/doing. It’s an indication of how it’s going to be received by a particular audience.

Example: conservative Christians being offended by “happy holidays.” If you’re a barista caught in the latest round of the Christmas Wars, this is transactionally relevant to your life. If the conversation you’re having is “why the religious right’s insatiable need to dominate every social space they’re in shouldn’t override the usefulness of ‘happy holidays’ as a catchall,” then their offense (and the ways it’s used to control the public sphere) is the whole thing you’re taking issue with, so fuck their delicate sensibilities.

If, on the other hand, you’re trying to convince the Baptist church down the street to join in your charity drive, the knowledge that this innocent-sounding phrase is a group-specific berserk button is really fucking useful.

A word that has an ugly history as a slur in one country can be innocuous in another--does that mean that when people in the UK say “fag” or people in the US say “spaz,” they’re unwittingly committing a moral offense against the universe? No, it means “this word is used completely differently across the pond” is really fucking useful information for avoiding or defusing awkward situations.

The world is pluralistic. It’s full of different audiences, in different contexts, with different values, and wildly different opinions on how aggressively some values should trump other ones. “This is offensive to Group X” is of fairly limited utility for making demands on the public sphere, where no one’s sensibilities point-blank override everyone else’s freedom to do their thing in peace. In that context, “offensiveness” slots into the general social framework for “rudeness” and “tastelessness,” both of which can vary from mild to egregious. A heavy-handed, domineering overreaction to mild instances of them is itself rude, a breach of the tolerance that lets us all coexist. Sure, argue that something is more offensive to Group X than most people realize, and should be considered far more rude than it currently is. But expecting a universal taboo on anything that’s even slightly irksome to Group You Want Accomodated is unrealistic--and what’s more, it’s the shitty, petty behavior of someone who thinks they’re entitled to total dominance, fuck all competing concerns, the entire world should treat them like they’re the sole audience to cater to. It doesn’t work like that for the religious right, and it doesn’t work like that for the parts of the left that have cribbed the religious right’s politics of weaponized grievance.

OTOH, if Group X is the main audience you’re trying to persuade in a specific context, then yes, it is very useful to know what rubs them the wrong way. If most of the people you hang out with are in Group X, familiarity with the shibboleths and the sore spots helps keep you from coming off in ways you didn’t intend. Hell, even if your hobbies include getting into vicious flamewars with Group X on Twitter, knowing what the group considers offensive helps you parse dog-whistles and subtext.

tl;dr: “this female character is a stereotype that’s offensive to women” = fucking useless for telling people who already like the thing to stop liking it, very useful for executives trying to figure out why the fuck they can’t attract female audiences. “This stereotype gets slung around so casually, but the implications are kinda horrifying if you stop and think about it for a second” = far more likely to get some creators who might’ve unthinkingly slung it around to consider better options, and to sour enough of the audience on the trope that it starts becoming a liability.

In the general space, you’re looking to tweak the standards of rudeness and tastelessness, not impose taboos or extract unilateral concessions from culture at large. It’s when you’re the target audience that the nitty-gritty of what rubs you the wrong way becomes vital. You aren’t always the target audience. But it’s useful information for when you are.

75 notes · View notes

democratsunited-blog · 6 years

Text

Michael Avenatti says Democrats must 'fight fire with fire' as he eyes presidential run | US news

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=7707

Michael Avenatti says Democrats must 'fight fire with fire' as he eyes presidential run | US news

Michael Avenatti could become the second person to go from cable news fixture to president.

Speaking to a crowd of activists at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding event, Avenatti left the room electrified. The lawyer, who is exploring a potential presidential bid, turned what has been a sleepy presidential pre-season so far upside down.

The lawyer for Stormy Daniels has become a national sensation with his ever-constant appearances on cable news advocating for his client and attacking Donald Trump. But while Democratic activists like Avenatti on television, they love his live show Friday. They clapped, they cheered and flocked to him for selfies afterwards in a mob scene.

Jeff Link, a top Democratic operative in the state who was spending the day accompanying Avenatti, said the only comparison he had ever witnessed was Barack Obama’s first visit to the state, in 2006.

In his remarks, which went for nearly half an hour, or twice as long as the limit for speakers at the event, Avenatti drew repeated standing ovations as he called for a vigorous, aggressive Democratic response to Trump.

He turned Michelle Obama’s famous statement from the 2016 convention – “When they go low, we go higher” – by telling the crowd: “When they go low, I say, we hit harder.”

I haven’t been this excited since JFK.

Bonnie Norris, supporter

Avenatti insisted on tough tactics, telling the cheering audience: “I believe that our party, the Democratic party, must be a party that fights fire with fire” and warned that for too long the party has had a “tendency to bring nail clippers to a gunfight”.

The trial lawyer also acknowledged the unusual circumstances that brought him to the point of considering a presidential bid. “What, you may be asking, is a quote-unquote porn star lawyer doing talking to us about our republic, our party?” He cast himself as a protector of the little guy. “I can stand here today and say with pride that I’m not just some TV lawyer,” said Avenatti. “I’ve been fighting for Davids versus the Goliaths for 18 years, my entire career.”

After his speech, Avenatti spent over 20 minutes surrounded by a mob of attendees who were seeking selfies. Among the group of mostly female fans was Bonnie Norris, who had driven four hours from Red Oak, Iowa, to see Avenatti. “I think he is fantastic,” said Norris. She seemed giddy about the experience. “I daydreamed that I would get a selfie with him and I got it!”

When asked if she would support him for president, Norris said “Michael? I want to be on his campaign.” The former Obama and Sanders supporter said: “I haven’t been this excited since JFK.”

Michael Avenatti attends the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding in Clear Lake Iowa. Photograph: STRINGER/Reuters

Despite the combative rhetoric, Avenatti embraced mostly conventional Democratic policy including “sensible gun control”, investing in public schools and a “real infrastructure plan”. Among current progressive shibboleths, he supported Medicare for all.

However, Avenatti came out against abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, (ICE) to reporters after the event. “I completely disagree with the idea of eliminating ICE. We should not eliminate ICE, it’s like saying we should eliminate the police force.” The trial lawyer, who recently went to the US-Mexico border and has done legal work on behalf of families being separated, made clear he favored changing policies on ICE and said the agency was engaging in “abuses of power”.

He also said he was still unsure about full repeal of the 2017 Republican tax cut bill. “I haven’t made a decision,” said Avenatti. “I am exploring that, researching that, seeking advice from people relating to the tax plan as far as whether it should be fully revealed or partially repealed. Ultimately I’ll certainly have a position.”

‘I think I could do the job’

Although he has no experience in elective or appointed office, Avenatti felt comfortable that he could serve as president. “I think I could do the job,” he told the Guardian. “I’m fairly confident I could do the job. I think one of the reasons why I could do the job is because I think people would be enthusiastic about assisting me. You know being president is a solo decision. You surround yourself with highly qualified people that are smarter about issues than you are. But that’s not enough. You then have to listen to them.”

Avenatti acknowledged conversations with former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who has claimed to have recordings of Trump, but did not comment any further. “I’m not going to go into the details of what I said about that. She had reached out to me a number of months ago,” said the lawyer.

Avenatti, appeared alongside two darkhorse presidential candidates, Congressman John Delaney of Maryland and Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio. .

The Wing Ding wasn’t Avenatti’s only event in Iowa. On Wednesday evening, Avenatti had a private dinner at a country club in Des Moines where he dined with top Iowa operatives as well as a number of past and present chairs of the Iowa Democratic Party.

On Thursday, Avenatti visited the Iowa state fair and, on Friday, before the event, he visited a northern Iowa farm to learn about agriculture policy. He told the Guardian that it was “very illuminating.”

This won’t be Avenatti’s only lesson in Iowa. The trial lawyer is returning to Des Moines later in August to speak before a convention of local Democratic election officials.

Read full story here

#Democrats

0 notes

newstfionline · 5 years

Text

Trump sparks a debate over the future of American power

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, December 17, 2018

President Trump will retreat to his Florida resort at the end of this week. Nearing the halfway point of his term in office, his political isolation in Washington is deepening. A slew of candidates balked at taking the job of White House chief of staff--a post of tremendous influence that has in the age of Trump become a poisoned chalice from which few want to drink. A funding spat with the Democrats prompted Trump to vow a government shutdown, much to the chagrin of members of his own party. And the legal inquiries into the president’s campaign and businesses are mounting.

It’s not just Trump’s domestic agenda that’s facing scrutiny. Last week, Trump received a stinging bipartisan rebuke from Congress over his administration’s embrace of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the particularly reckless royal holding power in Riyadh. The high-profile climate meetings that took place in Poland only underscored the extent to which this White House has alienated itself from the international mainstream on environmental policy--and highlighted, yet again, how the rest of the world is plowing ahead in spite of Trump, not with him.

Of course, Trump came to power vowing to be a disrupter on the global stage. He said he was intent on reforming a post-World War II international order that had outlived its usefulness for Americans. But the White House’s efforts overseas--including its rejection of the Paris climate accord, the waging of trade wars, the unraveling of the Iran nuclear deal, the persistent belittling of allies and the perplexing coddling of autocrats--have unsettled Washington as much as they have disturbed American partners abroad.

To be sure, discussions about the waning of the United States as the world’s sole superpower predate Trump. But two years of his tumultuous presidency have intensified Washingtonian angst about the future of American power and how America should seek to lead a more fractured planet--or whether it should try at all.

“It’s historical fact that great nations and empires all have a beginning and an end,” said James Jones, a retired U.S. general, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and outgoing chairman of the Atlantic Council, speaking Friday in Washington at a forum hosted by his think tank. “There’s a naive belief in our country that there’s some sort of destiny, that the primacy of the United States is ensured for some reason forever. I don’t think that’s the case.”

To that end, the Atlantic Council, an organization deeply invested in the furtherance of American leadership, is planning on floating a new set of principles to safeguard the “rules-based order”--the euphemism often used to explain the status quo authored by the United States more than half a century ago. It wants to “revitalize” and “defend” this order, not just from the rising authoritarian might of China, but in the face of Trump’s own nationalist and protectionist agenda and those of his ilk.

At the forum, speakers warned of the White House’s disregard for “values-based” foreign policy--seen both in Trump’s cynical accommodation of figures such as the Saudi crown prince as well as his demagoguery over migrants and refugees coming to the United States. Washington, they feared, was seeing its credibility evaporate among allies. This sentiment was echoed by Jake Sullivan, a former Obama administration official and Hillary Clinton adviser, in a recent essay outlining what a liberal, post-Trump foreign policy ought to look like.

“An energized, inspiring, and ultimately successful foreign policy must cut through Trump’s false, dog-whistling choice between globalism and nationalism,” wrote Sullivan. “It must combine the best kind of patriotism (a shared civic spirit and a clear sense of the national interest) and the best kind of internationalism (a recognition that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you need to grab a bucket). And it should reject the worst kind of nationalism (damn-the-consequences aggression and identity-based hate-mongering) and the worst kind of internationalism (the self-congratulatory insulation of the Davos elite).”

But that’s a tricky needle to thread. On the right, Trump and his lieutenants have spent their time in power casting the liberal pieties of the Obama era as supposed obstacles to the American national interest and see themselves at the forefront of a nationalist wave taking control across the world.

Among the Democrats, there’s a burgeoning debate about what kind of counter to “internationalism” ought to be embraced: It’s easy to scorn the “Davos elite,” but it’s another thing to pursue policies that target the power and privileges of influential multinational corporations or question the shibboleths of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism. It’s sensible to urge American restraint in the Middle East and other geopolitical flash points, but it’s harder to convince official Washington to eschew new military entanglements.

And though Trump and his political rivals may not agree on much, both may succumb to the old temptations of the Cold War.

At the Atlantic Council’s forum, the specter of China loomed over proceedings. Adm. Michael Rogers, a former head of the National Security Agency, feared China could outpace the United States in its abilities to wage cyberwarfare. Sen. Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.), a figure largely loyal to Trump, described China as “a unique adversary in the world.” Though Cotton’s hawkish views on Iran have earned him many detractors, there aren’t that many lawmakers on the other side of the aisle who would disagree with his antipathy toward Beijing.

That the United States is almost inexorably lurching into a great-power confrontation with China ought to be a concern, suggested Emma Ashford and Trevor Thrall of the libertarian Cato Institute. “The growing consensus on China is troubling. Having identified China as America’s biggest strategic challenge, neither party has identified a clear goal,” Ashford and Thrall wrote. “Nor have they articulated how a new approach to China would provide a foundation for a broader vision of American foreign policy ... The risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on China--through confrontation without purpose--is real.”

Analysts liken the febrile moment to an earlier era of 19th century politics, when Europe’s industrializing, imperial powers entered into alliances that ultimately convulsed the world into conflict.

“What we are seeing today resembles the mid-nineteenth century in important ways: the post-World War II, post-Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis,” wrote Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A century ago, that crisis arrived. This time, the current crop of American politicians--Trump included--can still stave off calamity.

“Now is the time to make sure one never materializes, be it from a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese relations, a clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects of climate change,” Haass continued. “The good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad news is that it is far from certain that it will not.”

#US influence #US power #American influence #American power

0 notes

jackstr67 · 6 years

Text

Mon., 1-1-18

As protests continue in Iran, Donald Trump is doing about the dumbest thing possible regarding it by urging violent and clearly outnumbered protestors, for whom there is zero evidence of general public support, into more and more aggressive confrontations with Iranian police.

Said police have been issuing warnings of a coming crackdown if protests are not relaxed. That crackdown is sure to be brutal as we have seen happen before in Iran. But unlike in places like Congo the Iranian government has given fair warning about it to protestors who are physically aggressive, and how many regimes do that? Trump’s loudmouthed cheering on of protestors at this point is not only stupid but dangerous, and could get more people killed.

Reports of clashes between police and protestors so far make clear that the protestors could be the ones instigating the violence. We actually know little of these “demonstrators” except that they mouth the usual shibboleths about “democracy” (of the kind that sponsors the abortion genocide of millions like American democracy?) and “freedom” (like the kind we have in America where the National Security Agency was exposed for illegally spying on …… EVERYBODY?!).

Iran seems to have political leaders who are no angels, but who are slowly and surely guiding the country to somewhat egalitarian policies. Maybe not to abstractions like “freedom,” but to something more understandable to Iranian culture.

The Shiites of Iran seem at least a few steps above the Sunni dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, which the U.S. establishment has broken its back bowing to and where Trump totally embarrassed himself by kissing berobed butts during his visit there. And never mind that 9-11 survivor families are suing the Saudis for their support of that horrible day.

The U.S. also ignores the Saudis’ outlawing of Christianity and any other non-Muslim religion. Meanwhile, Iran allows basic worship rights for Christians and others, but gets villified endlessly by the U.S., Israel, and other corrupt “democracies” whose profiteering plans Iran stands in the way of with its own interests.

I will gladly debate anywhere any idiot who wants to call me “un-American,” and I will be blunt: Iran does not need to listen to word one from the U.S. government about anything. The U.S. government admits that it sent spy agencies to overthrow a publicly elected Iranian president in the 1950s. They replaced him with “the Shah,” a brutal dictator who did U.S. bidding all the way to his overthrow by the massive protests led by fundamentalist Muslims in 1979. So the U.S. government has itself to blame for whatever wrong is done in Iran and should at least shut up and mind its own damn business about anything going on there.

0 notes

omginstantpaperbouquetblr · 7 years

Link

By Pierre Rousset / Socialist Project.

Mélenchon, La France Insoumise, Populism

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s presidential and legislative campaign this year was different from the previous ones. There was a huge change in the relationship to political parties in general and to his former Left Front allies in particular. It’s important to understand the reasons for this change, as well as the implications and the specific context in which it took place.

First, let’s take a quick look at who Mélenchon is. He called on voters to “get rid of” traditional politicians, successfully skirting over the fact that he himself is a rather caricatural example of such figures. He was a member of the ‘Lambertists’, a current of Trotskyist background with a symbiotic relationship to the apparatuses of Social Democracy, the Freemasons and the Force Ouvrière trade-union confederation. In this capacity, he was sent into the Socialist Party (PS) in 1976 and built a career there. In 1983, he was elected as a municipal councillor and then to the departmental level. He became a professional politician and didn’t put down roots in any particular constituency; he moved up to the Senate, in a country where senators aren’t elected directly by universal suffrage but indirectly by other elected officials, and then was elected as a member of the European parliament on the PS party list. He was appointed to cabinet in the government of prime minister Lionel Jospin, who himself had come out of the Lambertists. Only now has he finally been elected directly to the parliament, but only after parachuting himself in to a constituency in Marseilles, the large Mediterranean port city. Lacking local roots, he was still able to lead the left-wing Gauche Socialiste current within the PS. This was a genuinely activist current that enabled him to leave the PS in 2008 and found the Left Party (PG).

What are his political points of reference? As I said, he originally comes out of the Lambertist current, not exactly the most democratic strain of French Trotskyism. He didn’t burn his bridges with this part of his past but nonetheless fully immersed himself in the Socialist Party. In fact, one of his main points of reference, and perhaps the main one, is François Mitterrand, French president from 1981 to 1995, to whom he was close. He considers Mitterrand to be a political genius. Though somewhat of a loner, Mitterrand was able to take over the PS, turn the Communist Party (PCF) into a junior partner by forging an alliance with it (the Union of the Left), win the presidency and hold on for two seven-year terms (a record for longevity, though not for radicalism!).

Mélenchon feels absolutely no connection at all to the revolutions of the 20th century. It’s almost as if they had never taken place. There’s before – the Paris Commune, Jean Jaurès; and there’s after – for example, Hugo Chavez. It’s a huge understatement to say that he feels no empathy whatsoever for my generation’s revolutionaries.[1]

He is part of a current of opinion that’s quite strong in France – one that is simultaneously left-wing on socio-economic questions (public services and so forth) and nationalist. I’ll come back to this later.

2012-2017: From Presidential Ambition to the Benches of Parliament

What has made Mélenchon tick since he left the PS in 2008? Well, Mélenchon has made Mélenchon tick, and it’s not a clever one-liner to say so but rather an important insight into what he believes. He identifies with figures who embody important political change (beginning with Chavez – but also Mitterrand in 1981 after 25 years of right-wing rule in France). It took me some time to get my head around the idea, since it seemed so odd and so foreign to me, but it was indeed Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s ambition to become president in the 2012 and 2017 elections. If you haven’t understood that, you haven’t understood anything. The change in orientation from 2012 to 2017 was tied first and foremost to a sense of opportunity. He chooses the character he will play and the political tack that he pursues on the basis of a tactical assessment of the period rather than a strategic project. This is the point Podemos citizen-council member Jorge Lago makes in his description of how Mélenchon changed tactics in 2017 after realizing that he had misread the presidential contest (with Fillon winning the right-wing nomination, not Sarkozy; Hamon as the PS candidate, not Valls or Hollande; and Bayrou supporting Macron).[2]

When Mélenchon speaks of a “citizen insurrection,” he means a “revolution through the ballot box.” His aim was to quickly secure the presidency – with the hopes of doing so either in one fell swoop in 2012 or by becoming the “third man” in those elections with a view to winning in 2017. In the event, he came fourth in 2012 – behind National Front (FN) candidate Marine Le Pen. He ran as the candidate of the Left Front (FdG), an electoral alliance between the Left Party (PG), the PCF and the various groups and networks that came together in the Ensemble! grouping. With 11.2 per cent of votes cast, he took the bulk of “radical Left” votes. This was a respectable result; but in his eyes it was altogether insufficient.

Debates at the time ran along familiar lines, having especially to do with the question of electoral alliances with the PS, on which the PG (Mélenchon) and the PCF disagreed. The PCF has a number of elected officials whose re-election often depends on reaching agreement with the PS, whereas the PG had very few (and ironically those they did have had been elected while still members of the PS).

In reaction to this initial setback, Mélenchon opted to break free any constraints placed on him by the established parties – free from his allies in the Left Front, but also free from his own party, the PG.[3] He made a “Bonapartist” turn by declaring his candidacy for the presidential election without consulting or negotiating beforehand and by creating his own movement vehicle for the elections, La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) (LFI). He has aggressively pursued this tack and it’s no longer a matter of rallying forces together (behind him) but rather of replacing forces much further afield.

Mélenchon always builds in opposition to something or someone, carefully selecting his target. For many years it was the Front National (FN). He took on Marine Le Pen one-on-one in the 2012 presidential elections and again in the northern constituency of Hénin-Beaumont in the subsequent legislative elections. He lost each time. In 2016-2017 he switched targets. “Kick them all out” became the new rallying cry. In the 2017 legislative elections, he ran in Marseilles – not in a constituency where the FN is strong but rather in one where he had done very well in the first round of the presidential elections and where the outgoing MP (from the PS), Patrick Mennucci, no longer had any hope of being re-elected – going down to defeat along with most PS MPs.

The economic program has not changed qualitatively. It’s essentially a radical Keynesian approach, absent any kind of anti-capitalism, with a far greater emphasis on ecological questions than in the past. Over the months, though, language, symbols and communication techniques did indeed change. Mélenchon has taken a close look at what has worked in other countries, such as Obama’s use of social media and the Sanders campaign in the USA, or the history of Podemos in Spain. He has taken stock of the traditional media’s declining influence. He has worked on his image down to the smallest details (such as the clothes he wears on different occasions). He likes PR stunts, such as using holograms to address two rallies simultaneously – an expensive trick that has already been used abroad (contrary to what he has suggested), and especially by Indian prime minister Modi. He works very closely with PR consultants. He is a professional politician, more than at any time in the past.

Facing a threat on the Left from dissident PS candidate Benoit Hamon, he intensified his campaign’s populist profile. Jorge Lago approvingly highlights this turn and only regrets that it came rather late, and for reasons of tactical expediency rather than strategic commitment:

“[Mélenchon’s] campaign has been superbly crafted. For example, the campaign video depicting how France will look in 2018, one year after his election, is really smart because he speaks the language of government and state. […] The French understand and identify with this kind of language. When I lived in France, the fact that this language of government and state was so widespread among people is one of the things that struck me most. In short, the idea of obliterating the language of the traditional Left and radical-Left shibboleths, and of banishing red flags and certain references from campaign rallies, was executed really well in my view, albeit perhaps a little late in the day.”

Speaking the language of government and state, obliterating the traditional language and shibboleths of the radical Left, banishing red flags, Mélenchon has systematically and deliberately built LFI by breaking with the historic references and symbols of a class identity (and not only of the so-called “traditional Left”). Though promoting the creation of a Sixth Republic, he has fully immersed himself in the Fifth Republic tradition by which the presidential election creates a personal relationship between a man (rarely a woman) and the French people. He has catered to the rejection of political parties, just as Emmanuel Macron has. From this angle, a candidate’s profile, his media brand and what it embodies are more important than the content of the campaign program. Before getting to that, though, a few more words on the elections.

Bouncing back from his defeat in the presidential election, and emboldened by his 19.6 per cent score in the first round, Mélenchon called on voters to elect an LFI majority in the legislative elections – which would have made him prime minister, setting the stage for a conflictual cohabitation with the Macron presidency. In the event, LFI’s first-round legislative score had a sobering effect even if Mélenchon was happy with his own win in Marseilles.

In the end, having run for the presidency, Mélenchon had to be content with his own election to the lower house and with that of enough fellow LFI candidates to form a parliamentary caucus – LFI has 17 MPs in total and 15 are required to form a caucus. This was actually a better result than what the polls forecast. In fact, all opposition parties gained from a relative demobilization of the Macron electorate in the second round of the lower-house elections. The PCF, for example, won in 11 constituencies and the FN in eight – depriving Mélenchon of the satisfaction of indirect revenge over FN leader Marine Le Pen.

The PCF has formed its own parliamentary caucus, separate from LFI, thanks to the addition of five overseas MPs, who enable it to hit the 15-member cut-off.

The new LFI caucus has positioned itself clearly on the left. Like the PCF, it has made defending the labour code its main focus. It’s too early to know how Mélenchon will remould himself or what he will do with la France Insoumise (whose remit, in its present form, was time-limited to the election campaign). Still, we can and should look at the recurring features of Mélenchon’s orientation and at the implications of the “populist moment” of 2017.

Populist Symbolism

Mélenchon often demonstrates a keen sense of political timing. This was the case, for example, when he broke with the Socialist Party in 2008 in order to create the Left Party (PG) and then the Left Front (FG) with the PCF. That same year, we had launched the idea of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and received a very favourable response – a fact which probably hadn’t escaped Mélenchon’s notice at the time. The NPA could only be built as the outcome of a lengthy and complicated process; whereas the PG was built overnight on the basis of forces already organized within the PS.

The NPA process was initiated at a time when the Left Party (PG) and Left Front (FG) didn’t yet exist. But the NPA’s actual foundation took place after their creation and when they were very much on the offensive. As a result, the entire dynamic surrounding the launch of the NPA was thrown off kilter.

When the Left Front began to run out of steam (created for purely electoral purposes, it ultimately became an empty shell), Mélenchon tried to break free from the arrangement in a number of ways, in particular by launching the Movement for the Sixth Republic (M6R). At the time, I found this initiative to be completely off the radar, since working-class concerns were primarily socio-economic in nature. Though the M6R itself was stillborn, the idea of the Sixth Republic did get some traction, with the crisis of the Fifth Republic’s institutions and the related system of parties going into full-blown crisis in 2017.

Mélenchon is always on the lookout for novelty, and this is certainly one of his qualities. He’s also an excellent stage performer, a talent he uses and even abuses. In a presidential system like France’s, this is an asset. The PCF was unable to find a candidate that could rival him in this respect, and this allowed Mélenchon to dominate – and subsequently abandon – the Left Front.

Here we come up against the question of an individual embodying a political future; with a project closely tied up with their own personal fate. I submit that this is the common ground between Mélenchon and the protagonists and theoreticians of Left populism: especially Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau; and Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón.

On the Verso website, Chantal Mouffe herself supports Mélenchon as a “radical reformist against a mounting oligarchy.”[4] She makes a careful distinction between the Latin American context (societies with powerful, entrenched oligarchies) and Europe (where the Left-Right divide remains key). But in Europe, too, she argues, it’s a matter of bringing an end to the domination of an oligarchic system, by way of a democratic reconstruction.

One of Mélenchon’s spokespersons and a member of his inner circle, Raquelle Garrido, is less finicky in an interview with Jacobin.[5] The watchwords of the 2017 campaign were humanism, populism, patriotism and Constitution. LFI is a “a grassroots citizen movement, our ideology is humanist populism. In many ways we have adopted the populist strategy of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. [Populism] “is a program. It is a demarcation strategy between a ‘them’ [the oligarchy] and an ‘us’ [the people].[…] our movement […] is intended to build something beyond parties. It has constructed itself by design — really deliberately — as something different from the cartel of parties we had in 2012.” The situation is “ripe” for “what we’re saying — that we need a peaceful solution” to the numerous tensions that run through French society. In 2012, Mélenchon may have appeared “too radical, too subversive.” He now “seems wise.”

It continues to be said of Mélenchon that he is an eternal “Jaurésien” (after the early 20th century French socialist leader Jean Jaurès), maintaining the reference to class but squarely within the reference to the Republic. The election campaign nonetheless saw a deliberate blotting out of the symbols of class-struggle politics. As the weeks went on, red flags vanished, giving way to a sea of French tricolor flags; and the Internationale made way for the French national anthem, The Marseillaise. The word “humanist,” unqualified, was seen as self-sufficient. Going the way of the hammer and sickle, even the raised fist has been upstaged by the Greek letter Phi (φ).

Phi has become the movement’s logo, used everywhere including on ballot papers. There’s some wordplay here (Phi sounds like LFI’s usual acronym “FI,” just as Emmanuel Macron’s initials, EM, are the same as those of the En Marche! vehicle created to support his presidential run), but much more. Phi evokes philosophy, harmony and love and is unburdened by a political past. A symbol of neither Right nor Left. When it comes to harmony, Mélenchon often disrupts things with his deliberately arrogant and contemptuous remarks, but Phi remains a neutral marker all the same.

Labour issues were at the heart of the Mélenchon campaign (against stripping workers of labour-code protection; on paycheque and taxation questions; and more), but not social classes as such. The idea of the “99 per cent” is about the people against the oligarchs. On repeated occasions, Mélenchon organized the biggest rallies of the campaign season. For the tens of thousands of people in attendance, class identity had been rendered invisible. This will have consequences, since France is among those Western European countries where class identity has been effectively pushed from centre stage to the fragmented margins – much more so, I would argue, than in Belgium or Britain, for example. A win for the neoliberal ideological offensive. In fact, although both come out of a left social-democratic tradition, in this respect Mélenchon is the antithesis of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

In Left politics, is populism a temporary tactic? For one of the founders of Podemos, Juan Carlos Monedero, it should only be used temporarily, during what in Spanish he calls the movement’s “fase destituyente” (“deconstruction phase”) – and then surpassed in the “fase constituyente” (“constituent phase”).[6] He specifically criticizes Íñigo Errejón’s approach:

“Defenders of the ‘populist hypothesis’, and especially Íñigo Errejón, felt that it was enough to mobilize those sectors who could deliver victory and that we shouldn’t raise issues that might lose us votes. That is, that we should only raise abstract matters in order to secure the broadest support possible: country, [the oligarchical] caste and corruption. [The idea] is to empty signifiers, but in fact it’s the very possibility of change that ends up being gutted. When Laclau says that politics and economics are the same thing, he brushes aside the material conditions for class struggle. I think that’s a mistake.”

It’s possible that Mélenchon will opt to resurrect a class-based approach in parliament and not leave it to the PCF alone. Still, and the question can just as well be directed to Monedero, is it really so easy to rebuild something that you have deftly dismantled in the first instance?

“Replacement” and La France Insoumise

“Replacement” has become a central part of Mélenchon’s message and political choices. There’s nothing to regret about the death of the PS, which long ago ceased to be a “workers party.” Nor should anyone want to breathe new life into it. If that were all this was about, then “replacement” would be fine and dandy.

However, for Mélenchon the era of parties is finished. So long live the movements! He doesn’t merely take note of the decline of said parties, he actively contributes to their marginalization. This dovetails nicely with the current situation in France, and it’s precisely how Macron and his En Marche (now La République en Marche — LREM) movement have succeeded.

In the present context, the consequences of this approach might be especially serious. With whom can a coalition of social and democratic resistance against Macron be organized when one’s ambition is to “replace” all of one’s possible party allies? After having carefully separated the field of electoral politics (a matter for politicians) from that of socio-economic action (a matter for trade unions), Mélenchon now appears to be portraying himself and his parliamentary caucus as the natural parliamentary expression of the struggles that the trade-union movement will undertake.

There is an urgent need to unite all resistance forces at the risk of being summarily defeated by the offensive that Macron is preparing around a range of questions – from granting employers more workplace-level powers; to enshrining in ordinary law the temporary measures of the present state of emergency in the country.

The problem is that replacement is the antithesis of unity.

Question: what’s going to happen to La France Insoumise? What does it mean to say that the era of (traditional) parties is over?

Mélenchon toys with the notion that it’s possible to circumvent parties, totally marginalizing and shattering them. But he hasn’t explained what will replace them.[7] LFI wasn’t conceived to be a lasting formation but as a temporary instrument for the 2017 elections. It was created in February 2016. No one could join, it was impossible to pay dues and the only thing you could do was make financial contributions for the upcoming elections. Dues imply membership and the rights and responsibilities that go with it. Signing up to the LFI process entailed neither rights nor responsibilities. Nothing is expected of you and you have no formal power.

There were perhaps up to 500,000 Internet clicks of people supporting LFI. That’s a lot. Internet users submitted their ideas online. A “synthesis,” or program, l’Avenir en commun (“Our common future”)[8] was posted for approval and about 97 per cent of respondents were in favour. Restrictive rules were handed down: LFI support groups were not to have more than 15 members, and shouldn’t straddle constituencies or coordinate their work between each other within larger geographic zones. There should be no local LFI conventions or general assemblies. These highly unusual rules (which haven’t always been abided by locally) obviously strengthen the authority of top leadership, while not necessarily doing away with the need for electoral horse-trading among different competing internal party-type groupings. Overall, horizontal functioning was at once very informal and circumscribed, with tight vertical control by the core leadership.

Activist teams were established, often at the initiative of the top leadership, and took on a number of tasks – in particular doing an excellent job of getting out the LFI message on social media. While there have been analogies to the Spanish party Podemos, it’s not quite so simple. We didn’t have a mass movement on the same scale in France and there was no space within LFI for a founding organization like the Spanish far-Left group Anticapitalistas.

The core leadership group was drawn from the Left Party (PG). There’s an all-in-the-family feel to it, with people who have a long history together. Some of them are now LFI members of parliament, some of whom had been LCR/NPA members before getting involved in the Ensemble! group.

Close identification to the leader has given rise to highly sectarian forms of behaviour from the Mélenchon fan club, which swarms together against any criticism online, to the point where their targets’ online accounts have occasionally been blocked. Mélenchon himself is no fan of criticism. I really want to stress this point because it’s part of a deplorable trend on the radical Left, where debates on substantive issues are mediocre at best and demonization has become commonplace. Disagreement is seen as illegitimate as soon as it touches upon a “sensitive” question.

So that’s how things have gone so far, but where are we headed? Mélenchon and the tight-knit group around him have to spell out the kind of lasting movement they hope to build. And they have to explain how the pluralism of society will be expressed if, as they have argued, it is not meant to do so via the plurality of parties.

It’s not hard to see why parties have been discredited. It’s not because of Macron or Mélenchon. The PS in particular self-destructed under the recently concluded Hollande presidency. And nor should the PCF and far-Left blame their own failures on anyone else. The same goes for the parties of the Right. But what must we (re)build now?

LFI’s social roots are very shallow. It would be quite ironic were it to make the same hegemonic claims as the PCF used to during its Stalinist phase. Long-time PCF member and faithful Mélenchon supporter Roger Martelli raises this very question in decidedly measured terms:

“Like the PCF in its heyday, La France Insoumise could very well choose to argue that there is no space outside its ranks for politics that are both realistic and revolutionary. Yet at a time of crisis and reconfiguration, where broad regrouping and collective invention are the order of the day, it is advisable to steer clear of any approach that in one way or another appears to call on other forces to pledge allegiance.”[9]

The People and Patriotism

Mélenchon sings the praises of France and always has. He sings the praises of France as global power, spanning all the world’s seas and oceans. He wants France to quit NATO – but “à la Charles de Gaulle,” in order better to defend its interests and prestige around the world.

This has nothing to do with the actual relationship of forces in today’s world, but it was very much part of LFI’s campaign. Running for the presidency, Mélenchon enjoyed speaking as the country’s (future) commander in chief of the French military, whose capacities he wants to strengthen (and whose nuclear weapons he wants to keep).

The “people” is a national-people, the foundation for patriotism. In an imperialist country, patriotism is not a sure bet for the Left! For Mélenchon, though, France is not imperialist. LFI doesn’t fight against French imperialism because such a fight is unwarranted. Its view of foreign policy is not based on an internationalist outlook but a geostrategic one.[10] So its view of the situation in the Middle East is based on an assessment of the relationship between global powers – hence the calls to cooperate with Russia and too bad if this means negotiating terms with Assad.

The same approach of rival global powers can be applied to Europe – so the target becomes Angela Merkel’s Germany (with borderline Germanophobic rhetoric).

Mélenchon also sees the unity of the Republic – France’s “one and indivisible” character – as sacrosanct. He inveighs against the country’s Regional Languages Charter; he attacked Hollande when he called for strengthening Corsica’s regional powers; and on and on it goes. All this prompted a retort from Philippe Pierre-Charles of the Martinique GRS[11] which concludes:

“The moral of the story is that progressives on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean cannot evade a serious and fraternal debate on how to bring about the total eradication of colonialism.”[12]

It has to be said, though, that Mélenchon’s stance around these matters has not elicited much response within the French “radical” Left. It’s a worrying and indeed demoralizing symptom.

Contradictory Impact

It’s quite natural, especially from abroad, to see LFI’s success solely as a hopeful sign of radical-Left recovery and renewal. And it is indeed the case that to a large extent people voted for LFI for left-wing reasons. The flipside, though, is that this success was also built upon a policy of shattering the Left’s identities, symbols and historical reference points (in the true meaning of the word “Left”).

This apparent paradox can’t be grasped within the usual analytical framework. But we must come to terms with what is taking place. The danger is that the net outcome will be more negative than positive – with the destructive ramifications on people’s consciousness weighing more heavily in the balance than the underpinnings of renewal and reconstruction. LFI requires a specific analytical framework that takes in its contradictory features.

LFI is clearly a multi-faceted space. A number of radical-Left activists have gotten involved based on the compelling argument that we should be in those spaces where things are happening. Unfortunately, this involvement took place without in-depth debate (with a few exceptions, such as Samy Johsua). In any event, a chapter is now closed. The long 2016-2017 election cycle is over. The important choices now are the ones that will be made over the coming days and weeks. There can be no getting around a substantive debate on the very notion of “Left populism,” its ambiguities and the serious dangers that they entail. As Samy Johsua and Roger Martelli have pointed out, “populaire” (“working-class”) and “populist” are not the same thing:

“Of course, there’s nothing disgraceful about finding populism appealing; there are solid arguments in its favour. But these same arguments can also lead us into a dead-end. Populism claims to be combative but it could well be paving the way now for future defeats. We aren’t about fighting with the far-Right for control of the nation; rather, we seek to extend the realm of popular sovereignty toward all political spaces without distinction. We aren’t about wresting collective identity, be it national or of any other sort, away from the far-Right; rather, we advocate the free embrace of identities and belonging – with a massive increase in equality, the only lasting basis for common endeavour. We aren’t about taking populism back from the far-Right; rather, we undermine their influence by building an emancipatory force rooted in the working classes. ‘Populaire’ (‘working-class’) is not the same as ‘populist’. Our efforts must focus on building this force for working-class dignity.”[13]

Once Again on the Political Situation

Overall, the results of the presidential election are very worrying. In the first round, the top three candidates were of the Right and far-Right. Emmanuel Macron is man of the Right in every respect – economic, of course, but also “philosophical” (his conception of the role of the individual in society); his profile differs only in that he hails from a modern Right on societal questions, unlike the very conservative Catholic third-place finisher François Fillon. As for the second-place finisher Marine Le Pen, she is the figurehead of the far-Right Front National (currently facing internal challenges following the calamitous end to her second-round campaign and the broad range of voters that coalesced against her).

The presidential race also shed light on the fragile state of bourgeois “governance” in the country, given the important role played by unexpected “bumps in the road.” After the right-wing primary, Fillon was seen as a shoe-in to win the presidential election. But he then got embroiled in a series of what can only be described as unprecedented financial scandals. The striking thing about it all, though, was how his party was unable to find a replacement, placing the hangman’s noose around its own neck. Had it been otherwise, Macron wouldn’t have won in 2017.

PS party rebel Benoît Hamon had a stroke of luck, securing his party’s nomination in the Socialist primary. At one point, he was ahead of Mélenchon in the polls. But he was unable or unwilling to break with the PS and the apparatus of the moribund party clipped his wings. Had this not occurred, it’s not certain that Mélenchon’s campaign would have taken off in time to reach his final 19.6 per cent result.

Mélenchon’s campaign crossed over into shooting distance of the presidency during a short period of time and in a number of stages – first, the shift of polling numbers from disgruntled Hamon supporters; then a TV debate where he got the better of the four other candidates; and finally, the growing sense that he could make it into the second round.

Macron and Mélenchon were adept at seizing the opportunity that the paralysis of the two government parties opened up for them. As a result, the political-institutional stage in France is now dominated by two movements that are “works in progress” – on a large scale on the Right (Macron and LREM) and on a small scale on the Left (Mélenchon and LFI). There has been an unprecedented 72 per cent turnover among members of parliament. We are in uncharted waters.

That being said, I think that the outcome of the legislative elections, coming on the heels of the presidential contest, have revealed the limits of the changes that have taken place. The president got his majority, but it wasn’t a landslide. In the first round, opposition tickets experienced the usual decline relative to their presidential candidate’s scores. They rebounded somewhat in the second round thanks to the estrangement of many Macron voters, no doubt troubled by new scandals involving newly appointed ministers (Richard Ferrand and François Bayrou among others). And through it all, abstention broke all previous records – hitting 57 per cent in the second round of the legislative elections!

Mélenchon probably paid a price for refusing to make a clear call to come out against Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election (as part of an attempt to hold together the wide range of voters that supported him in the first round); and for appearing excessively ambitious at each stage. Macron paid a price for scandals involving ministers in his first cabinet. But ultimately there was neither left-wing insurrection at the ballot box nor right-wing landslide. Even at a time of great party-political and institutional upheaval, political disaffection remains the dominant feature.[14] The democratic crisis is deepening.

Emmanuel Macron knows full well that he has not won a landslide. He also knows that his opponents have been seriously weakened, for the time being. So he does indeed have room for manoeuvre – and will do so for the worse. We are in a defensive position. We will probably need time to build a broad coalition of social and democratic resistance (instances of resistance already exist, but they are still marginal). No such coalition will be built without unity and absent renewal of political practice on the radical Left and in social movements. •

Pierre Rousset is a former IIRE director, author of works on both East Asian politics and ecology, involved in international solidarity and editor of the website europe-solidaire.org where this article first appeared. He is a member of the leadership of the Fourth International and a member of the NPA in France.

This article was written for the German monthly Sozialistische Zeitung (SOZ), and written just after the last round of legislative elections. La France Insoumise is holding a convention in October; that should be the occasion for a more open discussion on the questions raised by this novel experience in French politics.

Translation from French by Nathan Rao.

Endnotes

1. See “Nous n’acceptons pas de voir notre passé commun insulté par Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” ESSF, 20 Nov. 2016.

2. Laura Chazel, Jorge Lago: “L’hypothèse populiste – Du Front de gauche à la France insoumise: quelles influences de Podemos?,” ESSF, 10 May 2017.

3. On the 2015 crisis in the Left Party, see Clément Petitjean: “What Happened to the French Left? – Mélenchon, the rise and crisis of the Parti de Gauche.”

4. Chantal Mouffe: “French presidential candidate – Mélenchon: A Radical Reformist Against Mounting Oligarchy,” Verso, 19 April 2017.

5. Raquel Garrido: “France Rebels – Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign, humanist populism, patriotism, Constitution,” ESSF, 12 April 2017.

6. Juan Carlos Monedero: “Podemos ne voulait pas réinventer la gauche mais reconstruire un espace d’émancipation,” Le Vent Se Lève, 14 June 2017.

7. See the formulations he uses in the article “Le peuple et le ‘mouvement’” and Samy Johsua’s comments, ESSF “La France insoumise – «L’ère du peuple» et «l’adieu au prolétariat»?”

8. See avenirencommun.fr.

9. Roger Martelli: “France insoumise, PCF – Réflexions stratégiques sur l’après législatives,” ESSF, 22 June 2017.

10. Pierre Rousset: “Jean-Luc Mélenchon, l’habit présidentiel, l’arme nucléaire et la gauche française,” ESSF, 9 May 2012.

11. Pierre-Charles Philippe: “Mélenchon, le PCF et les colonies,” ESSF, 1 May 2012.

12. Pierre-Charles Philippe: “La question oubliée: la République, la gauche et les colonies,” ESSF, June 2012.

13. Samuel Johsua, Roger Martelli: “Considérations sur le populisme de gauche – “Un pôle populaire et non populiste”,” ESSF, 21 Feb. 2017.

14. Michel Noblecourt: “Abstention – Jean-Luc Mélenchon: la légitimité à géométrie variable,” ESSF, 23 June 2017.

from Home http://ift.tt/2v5TD5r

#NEWS

0 notes