Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit that the rhetoric from the sensibles is less crude and laced with sweeteners about “compassion”.
The underlying problem is nationalism and the organization of the world into nation states, a form of organization that fosters and promotes nationalist sentiment and attachment and downplays transnational concern and solidarity, which is “all very well” but shouldn’t come “at our expense”. This has been the problem since well before 1914, but was particularly in evidence then as the greatest movement of international solidarity that had ever been built largely collapsed in favour of supporting “our boys” against theirs. It was there in the 1930s, not only in the rise of particularly agressive nationalisms but in the failure of normal sensible states to come to the assistance of those threatened by it, such as Jews fleeing across borders. All very well, but not at our expense. And it is, rather obviously, in evidence now as countries struggle with people moving and with climate change. All very well, but not at our expense.
It took the catastrophe of global war and genocide to get people to step back a little from national selfishness and to build the rather feeble and compromised global and transnational institutions that we have such as the United Nations, the Refugee Convention and the European Union. And now those are very much under threat from nationalism, and from the fear that accepting constraints on the pursuit of national self-interest might cost “us” something. Hence Brexit. Hence Trump. But also, sadly, hence a large chunk of the self-described liberals and the social democratic left.
Social democrats are nationalists too. They promote solidarity, sure, but they promote it primarily among co-citizens. They want to reduce inequality and they want to use the state to do that, but the inequality is among fellow-citizens and the state is a national state. So they drape themselves in national flags and enunciate slogans like “British jobs for British workers” in an effort to ingratiate themselves with “the British people”. After all, they want to get elected and to get elected you have to pander to, well, the electorate. Sure, theirs is a new, shiny, multiracial and multiethnic conception of the nation and there’s a lot of work goes into promoting inclusive patriotism. But the patriotism is inclusive only of the people with the right passport and not of the others who fall on the wrong side of racialized nationality laws that were actually designed to keep people of the wrong origin out. Minorities who are admitted to the nation know full well that such admission might be reversed one day. Those of immigrant origin get berated for their “failure to integrate” for the benefit of a nativist audience who are just never going to be satisfied that those people over there who don’t look like us, who eat funny food and who worship the wrong religion can ever be part of “us”. So it goes, and toleration and inclusion are all very well, but shouldnt be at our expense.
Donald Trump campaigns on a slogan of mass deportation and is met by wild enthusiasm from the MAGA faithful. The British government, the Labour one, also talks of increased deportations of people who “aren’t entitled to be here” and the need to “secure our borders” and blames unauthorized migration on “criminal gangs” (“bad people” in Trump-speak). The German government, faced with nativist electoral competition, has moved from Merkel’s “wir schaffen das” to sending people back to Afghanistan and Syria. The European Union itself has been subverted by the exclusionary impulse. And all these governments talk about sending the unwanted somewhere else and pay dictators in nearby countries to stop them coming, even if everyone knows that means torture, rape and murder in practice. And for those who get past the gatekeeper states, there’s the prospect of drowning in the sea or heat-death in the desert. But “we” don’t see that, and human rights are all very well, but not at our expense.
Well, what is to be done, you say? And to be honest, I’m not full of clever solutions right now. The organization of the world, after all, promotes national identification which inevitably has an ethnocultural flaour even when we pretend otherwise and all the incentives to politicians are to pander in ways that reinforce this. After all, they want to get elected, and (sotto voce to the uncomfortable faithful at the back), the other guys would be far worse than us. So maybe we’re stuck with mass death outside our gated nations to be succeeded by mass death for all as we don’t want climate co-operation at our expense. But in the meantime, we can defend the international institutions we have and we can resist migration cruelty and climate suicide in the familiar ways of solidarity with victims, protest, civil disobedience etc. The odds seem against us now, the arc of history may not bend towards justice, but what else can we do?
{ 77 comments }
J-D 11.08.24 at 10:30 am
Marvin Harris, Cannibals And Kings: The Origins Of Cultures:
MFB 11.08.24 at 12:08 pm
No, the problem is not the nation-state. If all nation-states behaved sensibly, as most of their constitutions require them to do, then most of the world’s problems would be resolved and there would be far fewer wars. The problem is that small groups of very powerful people hijack nation-states for their own purposes, compelling those nation-states to pursue destructive policies while trying to cushion themselves against the impact of those policies. Ignoring this and focusing on a notion like “we need to internationalise the nation-state” ignores the obvious point that the EU, for example, has morphed into a genuinely hideous institution which makes the noisy forebodings of the British right wing in the early part of this century seem almost sensible (except that the expression of those forebodings was, of course, another corrupt power-grab).
As I see it, what we need is a democratized nation-state. Given that rigged elections are, these days, what is defined as “democracy”, it’s hard to see how that could happen. But until the people who get kicked in the pants by events are given a chance to vote against being kicked, I don’t see that anything will change, and handing things over to faceless bureaucrats or Ais a long way away and pretending that this solves the problem is neither profitable nor popular.
M Caswell 11.08.24 at 1:20 pm
Can’t spell ‘internationalism’ without ‘nationalism.’
MisterMr 11.08.24 at 1:45 pm
My two cents: in the “west” there is a perception of being falling behind, particularly economically, though for some groups it also means culturally (ye old conservative white male).
This feeling of falling behind and having no certainities is not limit to the poor but also to large parts of the small owners.
These fears do not lead to a shift to the left, because the one who are fearing this are not just the “poor” but also many people who are in the “middle” or “upper middle” so the idea of more redistribuition is taboo.
So they go instead for a localist identification (because it hides the “class conflict” side of the issue) and also are right wing authoritarians because they fear the future and want a strong leader to defend them.
The “solution” to this on the long term is a more egalitarian society, with less anxiety, but in the short term this is going to intensify the hatred (because a lot of people would have to lose a lot to reach a more equal society), which is a problem.
However I don’t think that the problem is the “nation state”, which still sucks, but rather these exclusionary policies are the result of the fact that people cannot solve the problems internally, and therefore project the problem on the outside.
wacko 11.08.24 at 2:05 pm
The West’s totally in the shitter, and yes, we don’t deserve sovereignty.
But hopefully BRICKS will take over and fix all that stuff.
oldster 11.08.24 at 2:37 pm
This election decisively proves that the problem is the pundit’s fallacy.
Martin Holterman 11.08.24 at 3:22 pm
@MFB: The old idea that democracies don’t go to war with democracies, so that all we need to achieve world peace is for every country to be a democracy does not seem justified today, if it ever was.
From India and Pakistan to Israel to the US I see plenty of examples of countries going to war or threatening war with a perfect democratic mandate, even if the democratic processes in these countries aren’t always great. The same would happen in Europe if European countries still remembered how to do war, but fortunately both the people and most countries’ governments have forgotten. (Score one for making war “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible”.)
As we read in Thucydides and many works since, democracies are capable of great foolishness and great violence, which is why they have human rights and the rule of law, to constrain the democracy. But on the international plain such things don’t exist. And as long as they don’t, no amount of democracy will protect us against war.
Janus Daniels 11.08.24 at 4:43 pm
“The underlying problem is” that the rich got to much power. They control our media and our governments and our banks and our schools… We live in plutocracy. Worldwide, plutocrats push neoclassical economics which leads to neoliberal policy which leads to austerity which leads to fascism.
CP Norris 11.08.24 at 4:43 pm
I think Bertram is right. Sure we can’t get there from here today but, at a theoretical level, this is the right way of thinking about things.
Peter Dorman 11.08.24 at 6:11 pm
CB is right about the pathology of nationalism and the way it carves us into toxic in- and out-groups, but the underlying question is about cause and effect: to what extent is nationalism a reaction to other forces rather than an instigator itself? The old left wing reply was that it was the division of capitalists by nationality that underlay antagonistic nationalism; the new version is that capital is global, and that compels those who want to control it to fall back on national jurisdictions, the more cohesive the better. And it is true that the most advanced versions of social democracy in the Nordic countries and Germany were based on mercantilist economic foundations. They came undone when the trade surplus niches they had relied on dissipated.
In the end it’s a big tangle. I don’t see any way to pull out one strand like national identification and demonstrate that it is more causing than caused. I share CB’s disdain for the culture of nationalism, but I don’t think there’s any way to overcome its political economic basis without working on many other fronts, from new strategies to socialize capital (including global supply chains) to structures that spread risk-sharing across national borders. If any readers know of folks who are working on these issues in a programmatic way, or who are doing this themselves, please let us know.
(The handful of people who have read my 2022 climate book, Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them [CUP] know I struggled a bit with this in Chapters 7 and 8, but it’s all very preliminary. It will be a bigger topic in my next book.)
Gareth Richard Samuel Wilson 11.08.24 at 7:22 pm
If you’re generally against the concept of a nation state, but accept that it’s impractical to abolish say, Germany, what about the Navajo Nation? Citizenship explicitly based on ethnicity, most of the powers of a nation state, and could be ended with a simple constitutional amendment.
Neville Morley 11.08.24 at 7:42 pm
I’m in Innsbruck this autumn, in the northern half of a region, Tyrol, that could be a poster child for the pathologies of nationalism: majority German-speaking area of Südtirol handed over to Italy because the latter picked the winning side in WWI, fuelling extreme German nationalism in the north (although sold out by Hitler in favour of his alliance with Mussolini) and leading to policies of forced Italianification and mass migration/expulsion. And also a poster child for the benefits of lowering borders within Europe, as now the majority of German-speaking youth in the region can easily head north for university without feeling that they’re cutting all ties with home, and Tirol/Alto Adige gets to have special status in Italy without necessarily being seen as potential fifth columnists. And of course this freedom of movement across national boundaries is not extended to others with much enthusiasm, to say the least – though one of the most entertaining sights in my visit so far was a traditional Volksmusik group in the city centre, part of a big youth competition, all dressed up properly in Lederhosen and Dirndl, with the (rather good) young trombone player manifestly of African descent.
Alex SL 11.08.24 at 8:18 pm
I don not like nation states either, but there is the usual chicken-and-egg problem: is the nation state some external factor that makes people who would otherwise show solidarity selfish and tribal, or are people selfish and tribal, and that is why they so readily organise their politics into tribes, nation-states, and city states? Janus Daniels has identified the more important factor, IMO: this was all unavoidable after handing control of mass media over to billionaires and replacing the security of the welfare state and union jobs with deregulation and gig jobs.
Minorities who are admitted to the nation know full well that such admission might be reversed one day.
Given some of the anecdotes of vulnerable minority members voting for Trump “because things are expensive now”, I am starting to doubt this particular statement.
What I think is happening here has two ingredients. The first is summarised well by the post with It took the catastrophe of global war and genocide to get people to step back a little. Our time is characterised by a deep immaturity that comes from politicians, journalists, and far-right voters never having experienced actual bad times. How many have seen their children starve? Lost two brothers or sons at the front? Queued for four hours in the hope of getting some drinking water? Stood in a protest for a living wage that was dispersed by a cavalry charge, leaving hundreds of protesters dead? Seen their sister die to a botched abortion? So, a politician can see governance as a game of getting one over on the other lot and enriching oneself, because the outcomes do not materially matter, because nothing bad has ever happened in their memory. Journalists can do both sides and horse race because outcomes do not materially matter because nothing bad has ever happened in their memory. Far-right voters can put a clown in charge and drink liberal tears because putting a clown in charge of the economy surely will not have any material consequences, because nothing bad has ever happened in their memory.
The second is that a decisive group of swing voters understands nothing whatsoever about how anything works but votes for whoever is in charge when they personally feel better than a few years ago and votes for whoever is in opposition when they personally feel worse than a few years ago. This means they will predictably put a far-right clown in charge if the ‘sensible’ centre-right politicians happened to be in charge during a recession or high inflation. They do not realise what they are doing even to the degree that the people in the previous paragraph understand what is going on, because their world view is so shaped by misunderstanding and ignorance that it is impossible to even have a meaningful conversation with them; but they still vote! (To quote a mixture of statements I have seen in real life and on social media, “Trump will pay the national debt off with Bitcoin”, “Trump is a business genius”, “the prime minister is a national treasure because he sent me a card for my 90th birthday”, “Helmut Kohl personally brought prosperity to the West”, “Climate change? But I thought they had found out that it was all caused by that one volcano in Iceland?”, “when climate change gets bad, ‘they’ will come up with a solution”, “AI will solve our problems”, “it doesn’t matter if all of nature goes extinct because we can just GMO new species”.)
Unfortunately, neither economic inequality nor the immaturity resulting from never having experienced problems nor deep ignorance about how the world functions would disappear if nation states were abolished, although, admittedly, taxing billionaires out of existence would become easier under a world government where states do not feel they have to compete for investment.
Mike on the Internet 11.08.24 at 8:53 pm
I think Peter Dorman @10 gets it fairly right. Nationalism is not the core of fascism, it is simply an emotional hook to get the rubes on board, and a stalking horse for transnational capital interests (for instance, American energy companies ginning up Canadian pride in Alberta’s tar sands, to facilitate their siphoning of resource wealth out of Canada). The core of fascism is an authoritarian defence of capital against democracy, and that suppression is primarily focused at the level of the nation state because they’re the highest political unit with real sovereignty and enforcement powers.
Lee A. Arnold 11.08.24 at 9:09 pm
I do not believe that the problem originates in nationalism or any institution or inequality or class structure. The problem is with individuals. Our attention and cognition are limited by time and form. We have been misled, over the last half century, by Hayek’s “knowledge problem” to suppose that the market system is the only solution. The following video, just uploaded, corrects that mistake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEaPv1k3BTk (The only programmatic way to break through limited cognition is by new inventions in language or art which coordinate larger comprehensiveness.)
engels 11.08.24 at 10:29 pm
The problem is capitalism (Bernie would have won btw).
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/06/2024-election-results-live-coverage-updates-analysis/bernie-sanders-election-response-00187980
engels 11.08.24 at 10:56 pm
In the Guardian, Rebecca Solnit (who earlier was informing us that voting is a “chess move”) has an early contender for the most clinically narcissistic response:
Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga
J-D 11.09.24 at 1:07 am
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where there was just one problem and that was the problem and if anything was wrong it was only because of the problem and if we could solve the problem it would fix everything.
Some people seem to imagine that we’re actually living in a world like that. I don’t recognise that world.***
I do recognise that attachment to nation-states causes problems, but not that it is the problem.
<
blockquote>If all nation-states behaved sensibly, as most of their constitutions require them to do …It is not true that most nation-states have constitutions which require them to behave sensibly. I have browsed the constitutions of many nation-states, and I haven’t encountered one which says anything about behaving sensibly.
‘Hijacking’ is not the best metaphor given that nation-states are mostly created in the first place by small groups of very powerful people.
That
is not true.
Ha! It would be less unrealistic to hope for archangels to descend from heaven and solve our problems.
There may be something in that, but … would a study of places where (at times when) most people had experiences of this kind reveal that they managed their affairs any better?
*** Unless, perhaps, the problem is humans? If we could just get rid of all humans, would that solve the problem?
Peter T 11.09.24 at 5:50 am
I agree with CB that nationalism is a major part of the problem, noting that definitions of the ‘nation’ are flexible and contested. Looking for a way forward, it may be worth thinking about its modern origins and the problem/opportunity that it was a response to.
Our group is the best is a sentiment as old as time. Yet nationalism – that the core polity should be one group defined by a standard language/religion/culture, nurtured and enforced by the state is a late 18th and 19th century innovation. The industrial revolution brought a step-change in scale: people and bulk goods could be moved around the world, elites were unchained from locality (and from local control), yet intensive cooperation was essential to the running of this new world, politically and economically. The ‘solution’ was homogeneity imposed, very often through extreme violence, starting in western Europe and the US and then spreading.
The last several decades have seen the further spread of this process, both imposition and resistance. The same decades have seen another great leap in economic scale – economies are now beyond national control, the highest elites non-national and we are pushing global boundaries environmentally. The ways out politically are either strong global cooperation (run by whom?) or economic devolution, bringing processes back under control. CB advocates the first, but is it achievable? The mass discontent behind Trump, Farage, Meloni,AfD, Le Pen thinks it can have the second, but has no idea of the price.
innocent bystander 11.09.24 at 6:32 am
I feel that solidarity with family, friends, neighbors, and even class solidarity being higher than solidarity with out-group individuals, is simply a human condition. Occasionally it may take an ugly form, sure. Such is life. But also trying to suppress it, to scold ordinary people for it, might cause an ugly backlash.
I feel that it’s better to avoid forcing this issue, and find a different solution for problems in far-away lands. To try, perhaps, prevent our polities from creating these problems in the first place.
Robert 11.09.24 at 7:30 am
“The underlying problem is nationalism”
Maybe that’s true in a very narrow sense, in that nationalism is the most powerful of the going concerns that exploit tribalism, bigotry, fear of the other. But there have been other -isms before it and will be other -isms after it that were/are just as destructive.
The underlying problem, in other words, is people, and the evolved characteristics we all share, which are essentially fixed and stationary relative to the process of cultural evolution that is literally millions of times faster.
The problem is “us” and “them.” As long as the sloppiest, crudest evocation of “us vs them” stirs up feelings that will make people believe any lie, live and die at the word of a scoundrel, justify any cruelty imaginable, the world will get more and more broken.
Considering the number of religious leaders who have over the course of thousands of years tried to fix this basic problem, without success, I’m not optimistic.
MisterMr 11.09.24 at 2:23 pm
@Alex SL
“the immaturity resulting from never having experienced problems”
Actually AFAIC the research on right wing authoritarianism show that people who had problems, and therefore fear the future more, tend to be more authoritarian.
Not really a prrof, but, post-soviet people who clearly had significant hardships in their recent past tend towards rightwing authoritarianism and nationalism (Putin but also many other east european leaders).
This also leads to heightened nationalism.
engels 11.09.24 at 3:01 pm
What conservatives and socialists both know but liberals don’t is that human life without strong collective organisations tends to nasty, brutish and short.
wacko 11.09.24 at 3:20 pm
MisterMr: “…post-soviet people who clearly had significant hardships in their recent past tend towards rightwing authoritarianism and nationalism”
Isn’t it, rather, that people who lived through a decade of murderous chaos tend to value moderation, safety, and stability? Which has nothing to do with any “wings” or any nationalism.
JimV 11.09.24 at 4:54 pm
Humans evolved as pack animals, competing with other packs for territory and resources. Good luck eliminating that instinct, but maybe if everyone had sufficient resources there would be less need to compete. Or if there was a common enemy, as Theodore Sturgeon and others have suggested.
Alex SL 11.09.24 at 8:41 pm
MisterMr,
I understand the authoritarianism of people who support a dictatorship to achieve what will in their eyes be, say, stability, progress, equality, independence, or unity. I do not understand the immaturity of those who vote for somebody who is widely known to be unfit for office, selfish, and increasingly incapable of formulating a sentence, any sentence … because his election triggers the libs, and not although but because every security expert and scientist warns against his election. This is a petulant lack of seriousness that I find unprecedented.
They are not seriously worried about trans Muslim gay atheist communists taking over their country like somebody in 1930 was afraid of communists taking over, they merely play an act, because it is fun to get together to bully others. They know he won’t improve anything for them, and they are okay with their own nation or even their own personal welfare being harmed to a degree, they just hope, to quote one of his supporters from a few years back, “he will hurt the right people”. Faced with the choice between everybody including themselves getting 500 bucks and everybody including themselves losing 1,000 bucks but a million immigrants being deported, they would pick the second option. Only somebody very comfortable can afford that calculation.
Just to be clear, as in all of these conversations, this applies to only part of his support base, the ones in my first box. The ones in the second box do face adversity, and they do hope that he will improve things for them, only they have no understanding of how to improve things and do the equivalent of punching random keys in the hope that the computer does something useful. Much of this discourse suffers from everybody identifying their one obsession as the cause for an election outcome, when in reality the electoral coalition is always heterogeneous, consisting of different constituencies.
Note also that all of this applies directly to other countries, like Brexit in the UK and even the Voice referendum in Australia, right down to the thousands of social media posters visibly more concerned with ridiculing those who lost than with what the merits of a decision.
roger gathmann 11.09.24 at 11:53 pm
wow, I don’t see this in the same way at all. Trump’s first four years were three years of good economic news – not that he was the cause of, but which he benefitted from – and one year of Covid in which the world fell apart and Trump signed onto the biggest and fastest expansion of the welfare state in U.S. history, plus financing a vaccine project that was incredible. Then, being an idiot, he turned against everything he signed onto. Nixon, of whom Trump is like a dumber version, would have made political hay. Trump didn’t, got his ass kicked, and Biden had a chance. Which he utterly blew. I have lived through inflation before, but I’ve never seen a president produce such a piss poor and utterly distant performance as his pundit supporters talked of a vibe economy. Those supporters who make well upwards of 200 thou. Then the old coot shows himself to be incoherent, KH is given a hundred days to mount a campaign in which the Ds insist on not seeing, much less addressing everything that happened over the past three years, nor the memory that everyone has of Trump checks, and before that a high employment lower cost of living economy. It is like the D.s have utterly forgotten how to do politics. Hopefully, they will get it together and never ever campaign with such a lack of poltical sense. Pretty shameful.
MisterMr 11.10.24 at 9:38 am
@wacko 24
One man’s stability is another man’s fascism, since that stability is acquired by electing a “strong leader”. Part of the problem is that we usually don’t see history from the POW of those Italians or Germans who chose fascism, but them too wanted stability, trains who arrive in time, no more financial chaos etc.
@Alex SL 26
I think the ones who would cut their noses to spit on liberals/minorities also believe that they have been shortchanged/see the world as going against them; they are just very irrational and emotive about it, because they don’t really see other options.
Lee A. Arnold 11.10.24 at 12:49 pm
Roger Gathmann I more or less agree with you on the proximate causes of the US results. From a wide sampling of my week’s reading it looks like two different reasons, put together:
1) general anti-incumbency sentiment, in the US especially because prices don’t climb down after inflation is reduced, and
2) a large segment of Trump voters get their news and views, NEVER from mainstream media or cable TV or even Fox, but from an expanding, virulent stew of half-baked podcasters and insane paranoid conspiracy websites, perhaps some of it foreign intelligence disinformation operations.
It’s a bit too early for a real post mortem examination because the fine grained data on voters motivations won’t be obtained and analyzed for another 3-4 months.
On top of this, yes you are correct, the Democrats particularly Biden are “old-school”: they figure if they make steps in the helpful policy direction, and speak about it occasionally to mainstream media, then the voters will reward them. This won’t work for #1 or #2. That era is over.
On the Republican side, Musk stepped into their chaos and pushed #2 further with a massive multi-pronged propaganda and outreach operation.
Yet despite all of this, it is still pretty close to a 50/50 election (at present count, 50.5/47.9) which has been true for almost 3 decades.
Note that Chris Bertram’s post is about long-term worldwide trends. How these feed into the US election is a much longer discussion, of course.
wacko 11.10.24 at 3:05 pm
@MisterMr
“Strong leader” in this case is synonymous with “popular leader”: a leader acting in accordance with popular sentiment. Which, to me, is “democracy”, not “fascism”. Nothing’s wrong with trains arriving on time, and with leaders being popular (“strong”). Those are good things.
Isn’t it curious that according to the mainstream narratives every “democratic leader” is usually highly unpopular, while every popular leader, is usually “authoritarian” and/or “fascist”. What gives?
LFC 11.10.24 at 3:56 pm
roger gathmann @27
Trump minimized the seriousness of Covid for months. He ignored the pandemic contingency plans the Obama admin left him. He endorsed quack remedies. He ignored advice from govt experts who had to stand next to him at press briefings and listen to his unhelpful (to put it mildly) remarks. Roughly a million people died of Covid in the U.S., more than in other developed countries, many more than e.g. in Canada. Trump bears a part at least of the blame for that. While he did undertake the vaccine development, he had already badly mishandled the pandemic.
Barry Grau 11.10.24 at 5:30 pm
For some reason this reminded me of discussions I had with the Spartacists when I was in college in the late 1970s. True internationalists, they insisted that Stalin and Mao’s big mistake was believing that an intranational Communism was possible. But tribalism seems baked in to humanity.
Maybe we can view Hegel as thesis, Marx as antithesis, and social democracy as synthesis.
engels 11.10.24 at 8:05 pm
The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply ignore the demonstration, as one might have expected; rather, they exaggeratedly plugged their ears, made mocking faces, and, in one notable case, sarcastically mimicked the chant: “Eighteen years old!” Witnessing video of this event, my heart sank, not just at the moral grotesqueness of the display, but also in its sickening confirmation of the solipsism and complacency of Democratic Party officialdom. The conventiongoers offered a literal enactment of their lack of interest in the experiences of those outside their circle of concern. La-la, I can’t hear you—or, as Kamala Harris herself put it when challenged at a rally, “I am speaking now.” Not for long, as it turned out.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/exit-right/
Alex SL 11.10.24 at 9:57 pm
MisterMr,
Yes, but there is a big difference between thinking that the world is unfair to you because you can’t afford rent or that the world is unfair to you because you have to see more brown faces in your country and more female characters in computer games than you had to when you were little. It makes sense to me to put these into two different boxes for the purposes of analysis, because one of them can be reached, and the other cannot. Also, one of them is right about the world being unfair, and the other contains hateful, immature whiners and hypocrites.
J-D 11.10.24 at 10:49 pm
This general principle can work against nation-states as easily as in their favour, which is why it’s not a useful explanation when discussing nation-states specifically.
Eliminating instincts is one of the things that evolution does. Evolution has changed human anatomical and physiological characteristics in the last ten thousand years, so the smart way to bet is that it’s changed our behavioural and psychological characteristics as well.
MisterMr 11.11.24 at 12:23 am
@wacko
“Strong leader” in this case is synonymous with “popular leader”: a leader acting in accordance with popular sentiment.”
In what world? My understanding is that Trump got less votes this year that Biden got in 2020, and in fact less that Trump himself got in 2020.
Harris got even less, but this doesn’t make Trump popular.
“Strong leader” just means authoritarian dude who uses strenght to solve problems and to deal with opponents, like a though father would do with naughty kids. It is just that some people project this “strong father” image on the boss, and then imagine that he is loved by everyone because they are projecting on him a father image (newsflash: Trump is not loved by everyone, he is in fact hated by many, though not enough to elect Harris apparently).
Which leads back to the initial problem: Trump can’t represent a unified popular opinion because a unified popular opinion doesn’t exist in the first place, hence presidency is less democratic than congress, that can represent a disunite popular opinion.
wacko 11.11.24 at 8:26 am
Mister, who said anything about Trump? Not everything is about Trump, you know.
You were talking about “post-soviet people”; accused them of being fascists. And I said that what they want, apart from any “isms”, is some law&order and stability. You insisted that they are fascists nevertheless. I replied that your definition of “fascists” doesn’t make sense. And then, suddenly: Trump!
J-D 11.11.24 at 8:47 am
I know people used to say that the fascists made the trains run on time, but is there any evidence that they actually did make the trains run on time?
Assuming (what seems plausible on the face of it) that over the course of history there have been examples of leaders being popular and of leaders being unpopular, in what ways is it a good thing for a leader to be popular? Good for whom? If somebody told me they were reading a biography of a historical leader and that they’d just found out that this leader was highly popular, I’d think that if the leader was doing good things, it would be good that the leader was popular, but if the leader was doing bad things, then it would be bad that the leader was popular.
Another thing I’d be thinking about was that it might not be easy to find out whether a leader was really popular. People don’t always tell the truth about what they think or how they feel, including (perhaps especially) about their leaders.
Why would you want somebody to represent popular opinion, united or disunited? Why can’t popular opinion just represent itself? Anyway, popular opinion about what?
MisterMr 11.11.24 at 2:54 pm
@wacko 37
Ok, sorry I tought you were speaking about Trump as he is in the news lately. About fascism, my grandparents were fascist and proudly so (at least some of them), and I certainly knew people, somewhat older than me, that self described as fascist, so I think I have a pretty clear idea of who are “fascists”.
Turns out that fascists are normal people, with some specific political ideas, largely based on the presence of a strong leader, and those ideas tend to be very common in eastern Europe, and for obvious reasons (very bad memories of economic instability).
This isn’t an “accusation”, this is just a statement of fact.
If I had to accuse someone I would accuse the western countries that botched the transition from communism (the Russians and others were not equipped to do that alone, and we didn’t help). But since this already happened a lot of years ago there isn’t much point in recrimination.
That said, it is rather evident that this situation pushed a lot of eastern Europeans towards authoritarian politics.
@J-D 38
“but is there any evidence that they actually did make the trains run on time”
AFAIK the italian government made big works on the italian railway system between the two wars (standardising the various railway systems of the various pre unification ministates), but fascism basically cashed in this change. OTOH, during the 24 years of fascist government, they did indeed do various public works (the bonification of some swampy places, the addition of iodine into table salt etc.), but I can’t say if it did more or less than other non dictatorial governments.
However, mostly this is a perception thing, not the reality: people who believe the world is crashing around them are likely to believe that someone who looks stern will make things work.
LFC 11.11.24 at 3:47 pm
engels @33
That piece you linked is worth reading, even if Winant doesn’t have a lot to propose in the way of solutions. But as an analysis of the contradictory forces at work re the Dems’ position as the party, at least until recently, of both globalization and (what remains of) organized labor in the U.S., it’s pretty good. (That said, I don’t agree with a hundred percent of what Winant says, but that’s only to be expected.)
Tm 11.11.24 at 4:44 pm
The election was won by a global alliance of a fascist movements with a new oligarchy – media moguls, tech bros, fossil fuel exploiters. Rich people who despise liberal democracy and think they shouldn’t have to follow the same laws and rules as ordinary people.
wacko 11.11.24 at 5:36 pm
MisterMr,
I’m not questioning your personal experiences, but what about people with, perhaps, the same ideas as your grandparents, who do NOT call themselves “fascists”, and, indeed, say that they hate fascists? No, I don’t think your experiences with what ordinary people call themselves count much when analyzing socioeconomic, political and geopolitical phenomena.
Back when I studied this sort of things, I saw various definitions of “fascism”: national rebirth, statist corporatism, financial capital, blah, blah, blah.
If that’s all in the past, and now “fascism” just means “strong leadership”, then, well, where do I sign up?
By the way, Franklin D Roosevelt was often accused of (or “described as”, if you prefer) being fascist. A strong, aggressive leader for over a decade, easily winning four elections in a row. Statist solutions, war-mongering. Was he the same as Mussolini, in your opinion?
Tm 11.11.24 at 8:35 pm
If you want to discuss Trump’s fascism in depth, I recommend Thomas Zimmer and John Ganz:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/donald-trump-american-fascist
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-anti-liberal-left-has-a-fascism
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-fascism-debate-e72
And of course Timothy Snyder:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/what-does-it-mean-that-donald-trump-is-a-fascist
engels 11.11.24 at 8:50 pm
Donald Trump is not George McGovern. The attempt to portray him as foreign to the body politic failed, because there is nothing remotely un-American about him. His political DNA links him directly to Nixon, via echt-Americans like Roy Cohn and Pat Buchanan. The things about him which are supposed to be deal breakers – racism, xenophobia, misogyny – can only be seen as outside the American mainstream by someone with the mental equipment of an earnest child. The slogan Make America Great Again is borrowed from Ronald Reagan, an American hero who mocked the poor for being hungry, compared African diplomats to monkeys and (on the advice of Pat Buchanan) proclaimed the Waffen SS to be ‘victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps’. The idea that Trump could be banished to the margins by getting Reagan appointees to endorse Harris never made sense to anyone not already opposed to Trump.
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/dealignment
Tm 11.11.24 at 9:08 pm
Fwiw, No country has a better and more punctual railway network than Switzerland. And it’s certainly not the best example of strongman authoritarianism. To the contrary, it’s a very messy multi-leveled democracy with a strong plebiscitary component. It’s also an example of exceptional political stability.
Stability can mean different things. It can mean stasis, the absence of change. But regimes that try to prevent change are rarely stable in the long term.
One of the paradoxes of the rise of 21st century fascism, is that it follows perhaps the most remarkable period of peace, political stability and economic prosperity in recorded human history, especially in Western Europe. And that stability was guaranteed by liberal democracy, the rule of law, and international institutions like the EU.
Supporters of fascist parties want to throw that stability away. Dismantling the EU or NATO is not how you preserve stability. Tearing up international agreements is not stability, destroying institutions is not stability. (To be clear, there may be good reasons for destroying institutions but not in the name of stability!) The January 6 coup was the opposite of stability.
Putin is not a guarantor of stability! Starting wars and redrawing international borders is not stability. Hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers and international isolation are not a sign of stability.
Deporting millions of people and threatening the opposition with violence has nothing to do with „stability“ for Chrissake! Whatever these people want, it’s not stability. It’s radical change. The extreme right has gotten addicted to civil war rhetoric. Trump explicitly promised „a bloody story“. People voting for him support or at least condone violence, and his most ardent supporters can’t wait for it to happen. They don’t want stability, they want fascism.
J-D 11.11.24 at 11:00 pm
If you are looking for an excuse to despair and give up, then the piece is worth reading not despite but rather because of Gabriel Winant’s confessed inability to make constructive suggestions.
On the other hand, if you are looking for analysis of how to defeat Republicans, surely the people whose analysis is worth reading are people who have had actual experience of defeating Republicans? What’s Gabriel Winant’s track record in that respect?
I suppose if you can’t find pieces written by people who themselves have an actual track record of defeating Republicans it might be worth reading pieces written by people who have investigated cases in which others have succeeded in defeating Republicans. There’s no sign of that in Gabriel Winant’s piece.
LFC 11.11.24 at 11:41 pm
The noted historian Robert Paxton, author of (among other things) The Anatomy of Fascism, offered a definition at the end of the book (pp. 218-220), opening w/ the statement that fascism is “a form of political behavior” (more than a set of reasoned and consistently applied ideas). Whether Trump/Trumpism fits his proposed definition, which I’m not taking the time to type out, can be debated, but Paxton himself has said fairly recently that he thinks the label applies.
dk 11.12.24 at 1:33 am
The problem isn’t nationalism. The problem is what it’s been for centuries if not millenia before the nation-state ever formed: the progressive capture of all key resources by the super-rich, provoking desperate and incoherent struggles by regular people. We just had a little break from that owing to the compression of the wealth distribution in the 2nd half of the 20th c, but now we’re returning to normal.
equalitus 11.12.24 at 4:49 pm
The nation-state is in most countries popular enough that it would not be dismantled if referendums in most nations were to happen to decide to merge with other countries or not. Direct democracy is the most important after democracy, but nation-state is never good or bad per se, morally or by material utility value. Lichtenstein is a nation-state. It’s better by HDI than Denmark.
Tm 11.12.24 at 8:24 pm
Comment in Moderation?
Tm 11.12.24 at 8:29 pm
„The nation-state is in most countries popular“
It’s not even a question of popularity. Asking people to support abolishing the nation-state is like asking fish to support abolishing the ocean. It’s extremely difficult to conceptualize that the nation-state is a human invention and not simply a fact of life. Ditto for capitalism.
It’s extremely remarkable that something like the EU was even possible. Wonder how long it can last.
John Q 11.13.24 at 5:29 am
Responding to TM, the nation-state is largely a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before that, the people in most nations were either part of multinational empires or else divided into multiple small states. Genocide and ethnic cleansing brought things much closer to the model of “ein volk, ein reich” by 1950. But since then, migration, and the emergence of dual citizenship as a common status has undermined it.
Sebastian H 11.13.24 at 6:53 am
It seems like there were murderous divisions before nationstates. Why wouldn’t some other murderous division replace them? Race or even ‘race’ seems like a contender.
MisterMr 11.13.24 at 7:32 am
@wacko 42
I suppose we should just agree to disagree by now, but anyway, my definition of fascism is something like this: a middle class movement of people who fear downward mobility, but since they are middle class they also fear proper leftist redistributive policies, so they go for an ethnic (generally nationalist) identification and claim that they are against the other group’s divisive policies (while being themselves ultradivisive, but they don’t see things like that), and in order to suppress the other guys divisiveness they call for a strong leader, with whom they have a very strong emotive connection.
Tm 11.13.24 at 8:19 am
I’m aware of that, John. The nation-state, like capitalism, is historically contingent. But that doesn’t change the fact that these structures are so deeply embedded in the fabric of our experience that it takes a conscious effort to even imagine something else.
SusanC 11.13.24 at 9:27 am
@Sebastian H: Well, before the Peace of Westphalia we had the Thirty Years’ War…
Tm 11.13.24 at 10:19 am
@CB is it somehow forbidden to link to Thomas Zimmer in this forum? Would you be se so kind to explain why?
wacko 11.13.24 at 10:30 am
Mister,
‘middle class with fear of proper leftist re-distributive policies’ — your definition couldn’t be further from “post-soviet people”. Which means that we could actually agree now.
lurker 11.13.24 at 11:36 am
“Turns out that fascists are normal people, with some specific political ideas, largely based on the presence of a strong leader, and those ideas tend to be very common in eastern Europe, and for obvious reasons (very bad memories of economic instability).
This isn’t an “accusation”, this is just a statement of fact.
If I had to accuse someone I would accuse the western countries that botched the transition from communism” MisterMr, 39
Well, in Romania, the strong national leader was shot and that ended both Communism and the worst period of austerity and economic misery.
Other nationalist leaders came at the beginning of the new era, not as a reaction to the 90s. In Yugoslavia, Milosevic and Tudjman, in Slovakia Meciar, only then do Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia disintegrate.
You could say that the Russians, specifically, support a strong leader in exchange for stability and order. But Putin was able to deliver economic stability not because of his personal qualities or any ideology but because oil and other commodity prices went up.
noone1 11.13.24 at 1:32 pm
“…but because oil and other commodity prices went up”
No, I don’t think so. By that time, oil, other commodities, and all the rest of the resources were already plundered to the extreme. Government and legal economy were practically non-existent, gangsters controlled everything. I know it’s the official narrative, but I don’t think “oil and other commodity prices” are worth mentioning in this context at all.
LFC 11.13.24 at 4:49 pm
John Q @52
While it’s perhaps defensible to say that the link between “nationality” and state-ness in the full sense is mostly a product of 19th and 20th centuries, sovereign statehood is an older idea that was translated gradually into fact over a number of centuries in at least a couple of places, France being probably the paradigmatic example. Ditto for the notion of national identity. There was certainly a notion of Frenchness during the ancien regime, well before the C19th.
In the preface to the Vintage pb edition (1996) of Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Linda Colley remarked that “Anthropologists like Benedict Anderson, sociologists like Liah Greenfeld, as well as historians like David Bell, have moved away from the idea that nationalism was invariably a nineteenth-century invention, and have sought in very different ways a more nuanced interpretation of nationalism’s diverse genesis in different parts of the world.”
One interesting take, which I’ve read and would recommend w/o necessarily endorsing every statement in it, is Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (2003). (Colley’s reference to Anderson is to his oft-cited Imagined Communities).
John Q 11.13.24 at 7:21 pm
LFC You’re right on this. Quite a few countries in Western Europe approximated the nation-state model by the 18th century, though usually with some problematic minority regions (Catalonia in Spain, Scotland and Ireland in Britain), often still with us today. Thanks for the references.
LFC 11.13.24 at 9:30 pm
John Q
Thank you for the gracious reply. (I was not of course aiming to defend the nation-state model from a moral/normative standpoint, just making an historical point.)
Stephen 11.14.24 at 8:33 am
JQ: It might be worth considering the “nationes” to which the students of mediaeval European universities were regarded as belonging. You will perceive that in some cases there is a reasonable correspondence with modern nation-states. The idea may to some extent be a bit older than you think. Abstracted from Wikipedia articles:
In Paris, French, Norman, Picard, English and Alemannian.
In Prague, Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon and Polish.
In Bologna, Romans, Tuscans and Lombards as one citramontane group; Gauls, Picards, Burgundians, students from Tours, those from Poitiers, Normans, Catalans, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, Provencals, English and Gascons in the ultramontane group.
In Padua, Alemannian, Bohemian, Hungarian, Provencal, Spanish, Polish, English, Scottish, and fourteen different varieties of Italian (including Overseas, the Venetian Greek islands).
The Scottish universities had “nations” corresponding to various regions of Scotland, the possibility that anyone outwith Scotland might want to go there to study being considered remote except in Glasgow where there was the nation of Loudonia for all non-Scots.
Oxford had Northern and Southern nations, the river Trent being the boundary, Wales counting as southern: these were abolished in 1274 to prevent riots between them.
Hope this helps.
Chris Bertram 11.14.24 at 11:22 am
John is correct. In fact there has never been a state that has in reality lived up to an ideal of being exclusively for one nation/ethnicity. Postwar Poland might be closest, but all states have people who don’t conform to the national ideal.
eg 11.14.24 at 4:56 pm
A very good initial inquiry followed by some excellent observations in the comments.
With apologies to T.E. Hulme, to what extent is nationalism a sort of “spilt religion?” It seems to rely upon many of the same myth-making and symbolic gestures that meet the non-rational human need for “tribal” affinity — the “pack animal” (more like wolves than donkeys, at least most of the time) of JimV @25.
As for Trump, I am suspicious of any analysis that amounts to “blame the electorate” or any subset thereof. I blame rather the fecklessness of his opponents, which I take to be their deep insincerity where the wellbeing of their fellow citizens is concerned, beholden as they have entirely become to their donor class.
Peter T 11.15.24 at 10:32 am
I think I have quoted before Eric Hobsbawm’s remark that “identities are not like hats – one can wear more than one at once.” Before modern nationalism people were, for example Christian, French, Gascon and loyal to the Plantagenets all at once. Modern nationalism elevated on of these and insisted on a single standard – often primarily linguistic but also cultural and sometimes religious. Since the 60s the demand to adhere to a single standard has waned and submerged identities have re-emerged – Britain, Spain, France and others have regional governments, it is now allowed to speak Breton or Welsh or Catalan beyond the home, the religious ‘test’ has largely disappeared.
It helps to remember that c 5% of the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia identified as ‘Yugoslav’ (rather than Serb, Croat, Slovenian etc). There are signs that a wider European identity is slowly taking stronger form. The current wave of reaction comes after the 19th century strong nationalist version of identity has lost much of its strength – trying to live in a fading past as reactions usually do.
MisterMr 11.15.24 at 1:19 pm
@wacko and lurker
So do you disagree that in many post communist countries there is a tendency towards rightwing authoritarian parties?
Or do you disagree with the reason these parties pop up?
wacko 11.15.24 at 5:36 pm
Some “post communist” countries have governments subservient to the US establishment. These are, obviously, liberal and democratic: Czechia, Poland, the Baltics. Croatia and Albania, I guess? Armenia recently? Others not so much. Those are, naturally, “far-right authoritarian”. There are usual reasons for both kinds: politics.
engels 11.16.24 at 1:13 pm
These are, obviously, liberal and democratic: Czechia, Poland, the Baltics. Croatia and Albania
Let me stop you right there…
Mike on the Internet 11.16.24 at 7:30 pm
@eg #66
Over a third of America’s eligible voters failed to participate, and over a third voted for a convicted criminal who is openly corrupt and anti-democratic (and for a cabal of corrupt and anti-democratic legislators in both houses). A super-majority of the electorate is indeed blame-worthy here.
Matt 11.16.24 at 8:08 pm
I haven’t had the chance to listen to this (maybe soon, once my marking is finally finished, and I have finished some referee reports, if that’s done before the exam marking starts…) but Jo Wolff is always smart, so it’s probably good, and on closely related topics: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/nationalism-and-immigration/104437594
CityCalmDown 11.16.24 at 11:34 pm
There is a more than mild sense of depression about Chris Bertram’s OP. Bertram seems so disheartened that he does not articulate what his vision of post-nationalist world should be.
We all have good reasons for de profundis Despair.
Forced to guess, we can perhaps surmise that Bertram is a Kantian cosmopolitan(?) and universalist humanist?
To deepen our despair, consider how far we have regressed historically since Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” of 1795. Note the very fact that we continue to refer to a single, short essay 229 years old.
The immediate occasion for the essay was the March 1795 signing of the Treaty of Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, which Kant condemned as only “the suspension of hostilities, not a peace.”
Military destructive power has increased by several orders of magnitude since 1795.
Far worse than the Treaty of Basel, two attempts at peace agreements that in fact marked the escalation of even greater hostilities are the Minsk Accords. And the even more devastating Oslo Accords – used a fig leaf (inasmuch as any diplomat of the major power can even vaguely recall that they are obliged to pay lip service to the 2 State Solution) and taken as a licence as an intensification of Israeli military-colonial annexation, the construction of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocidal military siege.
Pertaining to the discussion here, as a Prussian public servant, Kant was unable to conceive of any agents except States to carry out his vision of Perpetual Peace.
To complete our demiurgical views of contemporary history, consider the war-criminal, genocidal recent record of the most prominent Kantian cosmopolitan thinker of the 20th/21st century – Jurgen Habermas.
(Although we can note that works that bear the name “Habermas”,the school of though named “Habermasianism” and the criminal-against-humanity antics of the two-legged carbon-based life-form named “Jurgen” are distinct, though clearly closely inter-related, entities)
“Habermas’s plunge into Holocaust revisionism marks nothing short of an historical turning point. The intellectual figurehead of modern, liberal Germany, who is chiefly responsible for the country’s belated reckoning with the Holocaust, has become this Germany’s tragic gravedigger, and heralds the dawn of a different Germany—one where anything goes, as long as it’s halal according to Staatsräson.
A different Germany where, having redefined ‘antisemitism’ to primarily mean ‘anti-Germanism’, the pure white German nation (the ‘new Jews’) is once again said to be threatened by foreign, malevolent, subversive forces. One where Arabs, Muslims, and refugees are denoted the ‘new Nazis’, while the actual new Nazis continue to rise in the polls.
A new Germany where any opposition to Germany’s involvement in an ongoing genocide is hysterically cancelled, denounced, persecuted, suppressed, and declared haram, as the country’s greatest living intellectual insinuates that the sheer ‘Muslimness’ and ‘Palestinianness’ of Hamas surpasses in evil the German industrial extermination of millions of Jews, Romani, and numerous other groups of people.
In a new study of Habermas, he is quoted as saying that, at present, everything to which he dedicated his life is being lost ‘step by step’. He himself is leading the way for this loss.The story of Habermas is the story of modern Germany: from Hitler Youth to Historikerstreit and now to Holocaust revisionism. They are burning down the entire house.
Within a few months, Germany has squandered its international reputation and goodwill. Decades of meticulously established diplomacy, soft power, and memory culture are gone. There’s no way back. Germany has exposed itself on the world stage for everyone to see. The world won’t forget, and it will hold Germany accountable. This, in fact, is already happening. In a statement that went viral, the Namibian President, Hage Geingob, called out Germany’s continued inability to draw lessons from its horrific history. It begins like this:
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza.
On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the twentieth century in 1904–1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.
For the time being, it seems no self-reflection can be expected from the white-majority society. German redemption theology cannot be so easily overcome. The sole hope within the country lies in the continued resistance of the largely racialised pro-Palestine/anti-genocide movement. It is the only truly anti-racist and anti-fascist force in Germany today.”
https://criticalmuslim.com/explore/issues/halal/german-redemption-theology
CityCalmDown 11.16.24 at 11:49 pm
Habermas’s reversion to worst forms of German military state-repression – the weaponization of the Holocaust in order to engage in Genocide denialism as ideological-political cover for further acts of German military-colonial Genocide – has, at least not gone unnoticed.
The 109 signatories of the below-quoted “Response” are forced into the unhappy position of schooling Jurgen Habermas, aging dotard of the ancien regime with one foot in the grave, as to just what universalist Kantian Cosmopolitanism should be!
As is, of all people, Slavoj Zizek.
“The conclusion that imposes itself from all this is what Harari calls the other, dark side of Israeli’s “soul,” the belief in Jewish supremacy, is in direct continuity with Nazism – and, to go to the end in this direction, THIS is the true deeper reason why Germany unconditionally supports Israel. So what are we to do? Owen Jones made a proper suggestion: countries should begin to boycott not Israel (which effectively is in a difficult situation) but Germany which is now continuing an inverted Nazi politics. “It’s increasingly clear that writers, artists and performers should boycott German events. As well as an orgy of state sanctioned anti-Palestinian racism, it’s estimated nearly a third of those targeted by Germany for ‘antisemitism’ are Jews.”[viii] We witness here a well-known scene again: Germans shouting at and oppressing Jews, deciding who is a bad and who a good Jew… So Germany got everything: full support of the darkest side of the Israeli soul with historical links to Nazism, and, as a surplus-enjoyment, a chance to humiliate and punish selected Jews again.”
https://slavoj.substack.com/p/boycott-germany-before-israel
A Response to “Principles of Solidarity. A Statement”
Human dignity for all
“We the undersigned are deeply concerned by the statement “Principles of solidarity” published on the website of the Normative Orders research center at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt on 13th November 2023, signed by Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther and Jürgen Habermas.”
(…)
“We are concerned that there is no mention of upholding international law, which also prohibits war crimes and crimes against humanity such as collective punishment, persecution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals and places of worship. Being guided by principles of international legal standards, solidarity and human dignity compels us to hold all participants in the conflict to this higher standard.”
https://publicseminar.org/2023/11/a-response-to-principles-of-solidarity-a-statement/
CityCalmDown 11.17.24 at 12:50 am
Amongst list of books that people have suggested here, I may add Alberto Toscano’s “Late Fascism”
https://z-lib.fm/book/28799774/663a80/late-fascism-race-capitalism-and-the-politics-of-crisis.html
The most corrosive force that undermines and destroys the national autonomy of nation-states is Capitalist globalization. The neo-liberal dismantling of state regulations both national and trans-national.
Hence contra what TM wrote above @51, the EU that grew out of the EC is far from a surprising historical transformation. The EU is simply a political consolidation of the previously existing transnational continental capitalist market. A political mega-entity brought about by the forces of Capital expansion.
If not for their rank stupidity, far-right ideologues would grasp this. As they are insane, they instead propound schizoid-paranoiac conspiracies about “globalists”, “George Soros” etc. The Liberal counter is the pitiably feeble “Stop it! That’s “anti-semitic”!”
In both cases, the blindingly obvious term both Liberals and Fascists are both stating, whilst simultaneously forced to repress, is Capitalism. Blindingly as in (self)occluded by the sacred cows of the(ir) ruling Ideology.
(An exception is Aleksandr Dugin’s “Eurasian” manifesto “Fourth Political Theory” that openly calls for the dismantling of Capitalism).
Liberalism and Fascism exist along a continuum located within the ideological cultural and civilizational symbolic order of Capitalist polities. Capitalist economic activity can operate effectively under both centrist and hard-right ideologies. The relation of Liberalism (including “conservatism”) and Fascism is along a continuum and the first can readily morph into the second.
Two recent books describe the inter-relationship between Liberalism and Fascism as capitalist ruling ideologies.
Domenico Losurdo – Liberalism: A Counter-History.
Ishay Landa – The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism
This is the explosively self-destructive, self-immolating self-contradiction that is the destabilizing explosion that will destroy Project 2025 Trumpite “christian”-Nationalism. Not only the ideology and political project of contemporary radical-Rightism will be destroyed but the USA as a capitalist-oligarchical polity and society will also be destroyed and forced to enter into an uncertain, internally belligerent period of foundational historical interregnum.
Rather than “warning” about a 2nd US Civil War, historians would do better to note that the US is currently in already fighting in the 2nd US Civil War.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/historian-sees-a-warning-for-today-in-post-civil-war-u-s/
Compare Jean-Pierre on Nuclear War.
“Jean-Pierre Dupuy (…) develops a counterintuitive but powerful theory of apocalyptic prophecy: once a major catastrophe appears to be possible, one must assume that it will in fact occur. Dupuy shows that the contradictions and paradoxes riddling discussions of deterrence arise from the tension between two opposite conceptions of time: one in which the future depends on decisions and strategy, and another in which every occurring event is one that could not have failed to occur.”
https://annas-archive.org/md5/53912f6c75e1725491a662c552f91042
The 2024 election of Trump is the culmination of American rightist politics of the post-Civil War period. On 5th November 2024, the American Right could both declare their final victory in the 1st Civil War whilst immediately announcing their commencement of the 2nd Civil War.
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s political theory contains two central tenets which can help us understand the shape that Trump’s neo-fascist capitalist polity will take.
Carl Schmitt’s Friend/Enemy demarcation.
Schmitt’s description of State power, “Sovereign is he who calls the Exception”
Project 2025 prescribes the takeover by “christian”-Nationalist loyalists of the entire governmental, judicial, security and military apparatus of the USA at all levels. This guarantees massive corruption, incompetence, chaos and instability. The very anti-thesis of the Fascist ideal of hierarchical, corporatist organic unity.
It is also creates by Schmittian definition an Enemy and political opposition. The sort of coalition that the useless incompetents of the Dem Party could never hope to achieve, driven as they are by the depraved debauchery of their elites’ vested interests, will be created for them by Trump.
Schmitt’s Sovereign, much like the “stranger-King” described by Graeber and Sahlins, exercises power by calling the Exception. This is made possible through to the theological aura that emanates from the Sovereign
No-one has done more to undermine and destroy the theological aura of the POTUS than Trump has, most particularly on 6th January 2021.
This not only undermines Trump’s authority. It puts into motion an entire system-wide legitimation crisis that undermines all State and civil society institutions.
Only in the event that American anti-Trump opposition sees that both the Fascism of the present and the Liberal path that led to it are both Capitalist-oligarchical ideologies can they possibly hope to defeat American Rightism.
Only if this new anti-Trump opposition is an anti- and post-Capitalist, anti- and post-Systemic Left can it at least possess the necessary conceptual and analytical comprehension of the task at hand.
As stated before the prospects of the anti-Trump opposition being driven by anti-Systemic Leftist analysis is minimal to nil to negative/antithetical.
(My own position today is post-Left demiurgical)
Manuel Kant 11.17.24 at 11:56 pm
I do NOT approve this message:
‘Within a few months, Germany has squandered its international reputation and goodwill. Decades of meticulously established diplomacy, soft power, and memory culture are gone. There’s no way back. Germany has exposed itself on the world stage for everyone to see. The world won’t forget, and it will hold Germany accountable. This, in fact, is already happening. In a statement that went viral, the Namibian President, Hage Geingob, called out Germany’s continued inability to draw lessons from its horrific history. It begins like this:
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza.
On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the twentieth century in 1904–1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.
For the time being, it seems no self-reflection can be expected from the white-majority society. German redemption theology cannot be so easily overcome. The sole hope within the country lies in the continued resistance of the largely racialised pro-Palestine/anti-genocide movement. It is the only truly anti-racist and anti-fascist force in Germany today.”
engels 11.20.24 at 12:15 pm
if you are looking for analysis of how to defeat Republicans, surely the people whose analysis is worth reading are people who have had actual experience of defeating Republicans
“We need to figure out why the Democrats failed, so we talked to Matt Yglesias, Rahm Emanuel, and Ezra Klein.”
https://x.com/samhaselby/status/1857883847142109463
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