At the time of writing, we've just had a week of absolute and utter chaos at each and both of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Predictably, this has lead to the usual profusion of armchair pundits and paid political "experts" pontificating en-masse as to what's about to happen - and, perhaps more importantly, what should happen next in the long run. Obviously, Trump's sensational and salacious dangling of the threat of an onslaught of Russian hackers in the general direction of Hillary Clinton makes for stimulating reading - but this is a sideshow, and we all know it.
The REAL issue of serious importance for us to be debating is the future nature of the Democratic Party, and left-wing politics in general in the U.S. of A, for both the rest of this electoral cycle - and for the foreseeable future.
Hunter S. Thompson, in the book I spent a goodly portion of my early twenties straight-out living, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, penned a beautiful paean to the lost promise of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. It's often called "the Wave Speech", and I thoroughly encourage you to look it up. In it, he eulogizes the way that a tumultuous series of crises and catastrophes conspired to bring about the end of that particular political dream (and in other of his writings, points a particular finger at another controversial Democratic National Convention - in this case, the 1968 one held in Chicago).
"We had all the momentum, we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Sound familiar? For Bernie supporters, it certainly should.
For many of us here in 2016, that elegiac high-water mark is probably Senator Sanders himself nominating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Candidacy in this year's Presidential election. Certainly, it will be some point scattered around the Democratic Convention itself, if not that precise moment.
Up until then - up until that Convention - it had somehow still seemed possible that Sanders might still, inconceivably either take the Nomination himself ... or nevertheless force the inevitable Clintonite juggernaut to accept such humbling, crippling concessions that the post-Bern beast which thusly arose might bear nothing but a passingly vague resemblance to the pro-TPPA ultra-Hawk candidate that had terrorized our television screens for much of the preceding electoral cycle.
But it wasn't to be.
Whether by the combined might of DNC corruption to 'tip the scales' against Sanders when it came to the delegate-count; the sheer overwhelmingly confounding institutionalized paranoia about what a Trump presidency might bring; or simply, as some have darkly joked, the semi-literal threats of what Clinton et. co might have done to Sanders if he'd held out ... the old man finally decided in the interests of party unity for a party he'd only just joined to sit this one out and apparently adopt a sinecure position as Clinton's cheerleader-in-chief.
And while this was arguably a minor tragedy in and of itself - especially in an emotive sense - I guess a moment like this might still require some sort of justification in order to substantiate the "high-water mark" labeling.
So it's this. The #FeelTheBern campaign represented something fairly unique in the annals of recent Western politics (particularly in the Anglosphere). A genuine attempt to not just put strongly and ardently anti-Neoliberal politics at the direct heart of a modern electoral contest ... but also to engage in what you might term an 'Institutional Revolution', and take back a party of the nominal 'center-left' (which nevertheless, as they are wont to do, frequently seems to behave more as a creature of the 'center-right'). Call it creating a 'safe space for Socialism'.
Whatever. The point is, it didn't work. And for any number of reasons - mostly because the institution true-lefties and young people were seeking to take over ... turned out to be about as hostile to this sort of outside interventionism as one of the Middle Eastern countries so thoughtlessly 'democratized' under Mrs. Clinton's watch as Secretary of State.
This doesn't necessarily mean that such an effort might not work out in the future - but for the moment, just like the Egyptian Deep State rolling Mohamed Morsi in favour of yet another in a long line of more American-amenable dictators, the Powers That Be within the DNC have conspired to head off Hope & Change in favour of going back to the status-quo ante-bellum. A good example of this is the selection of ardently pro-Wall St and TPPA, Tim Kaine as Hillary's VP pick. "Where's your 'Revolution' now?!", indeed.
All of this leads up to some fairly uncomfortable choices for Democrats-left-of-center and more proper Social Democrats going forward.
It would be a bitter pill, indeed, to vote for Hillary Clinton come November. But, so the argument goes, there is no choice. (And I'm sure we all remember that "T.I.N.A." - There Is No Alternative - is a favoured Neoliberal rallying-call to get the skeptical to accept the unpalatable everywhere from Thatcher's England to Douglas's Aotearoa) Trump is apparently too terrifying to risk doing anything other than granting total, blind and unqualified loyalty to Clinton at the ballot. Weathering the four or eight years worth of bad Presidency which Clinton may bring is thought to be far superior an option to taking a gamble on what a Trump-era might entail. "And don't you DARE vote for Jill Stein!"
But here's a thought, and a probably highly controversial opinion.
What if Trump winning made it more likely rather than less for leftists to get organized, field candidates, and win seats in the American political system. What if the stultifying and suffocating influence of the Clinton-machine Democrats had exactly the opposite effect (certainly seems to be working like that already). What if, in short, it was actually desirable from a long-term left-wing perspective that Clinton lost in November?
There's already some precedent for this internationally. Here in New Zealand, for instance, one reason why the true-left wing resistance was so slow and inefficient at organizing and mobilizing against Rogernomics was precisely because it was the nominally left-of-center party carrying out the reforms and the dastardly right-wing economic agenda. Just like Clinton. It took the evils of Ruthanasia carried out under National for parties like The Alliance and New Zealand First to properly coagulate and start winning serious electoral victories.
I don't begrudge people who've made their own personal judgement-call that Trump's over-the-top and abhorrent rhetoric means that he's a bete-noir who absolutely must be beaten at many costs (although I DO most strongly sneer at those who seek to pretend that Hillary is an actually-objectively straight-up Good Option on her own terms and merits).
But if Americans (in whole or most likely in part) were serious about challenging the prevailing conditions of neoliberalism and globalism which have so perniciously ensnared their country - and thus the world at large - for so long, then perhaps a different conversation is needed.
Instead of ringing in the Apocalypse with manic doomsaying about the Republican option ... or celebrating a decidedly false-Messiah (for the purposes of this metaphalagy, perhaps a proper functional Anti-Christ) in the form of the current Democratic nominee ... how about thinking of and discussing the serious business of building up a genuine left-wing alternative option and what might be required for this in the immediate years to come.
That's how we get The Wave to roll back. In, this time.
Ensuring, in other words, that the tide doesn't stay out forever - and that the much-mythologized wave of history one day does in fact roll in up the beach again.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Sunday, July 24, 2016
Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XV: The New Fault-Line In Politics - Globalists Versus The Rest
There is a new divide in politics; a cleavage which doesn't tie itself handily to the clean and simplistic "left-right" or even "liberal-conservative" axes that have collectively bounded our political understanding in years previous.
Instead, this fault-line or fissure runs along a far broader front. Whether you wish to delineate the two major oppositional forces as being Globalists versus Protectionists in an economic sense, or Elitists versus Populist-Democrats in an electoral one ... it has become painfully clear over the last year or two of strange rumblings in the politisphere that the paradigms with which we used to broadly conceptualize politics have become painfully inadequate.
New Zealand, perhaps surprisingly, has lead the way and crested the charge on this. Back when the Neoliberal Revolution became truly Institutionalized with Ruthanasia in the early 1990s, it created a situation wherein both the major parties of both nominal Left and suddenly avowed Right came together to jointly uphold our newfound More-Market and Less-Human economic consensus. This necessitated the coagulation of oppositional forces drawn from right across the ordinary political spectrum in order to oppose same - and lest you think I'm talking about New Zealand First, consider for a moment the number of ex-National Party MPs who found themselves part and party to The Alliance.
Something similar has recently become apparent in the gladiator-pit of American politics, too. There, it's the perhaps surprising degree of policy convergence between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in opposition to the economics of globalization that's collectively sold out several generations of American workers - and in joint support of anti-elitist populist politics - which sets the ground for viewing this strange synthesis.
Although it's the forces arraying themselves in opposition to BOTH of them which prove that we really have arrived at a curious place in modern politics. It's one thing to read a semi-snarky piece of principled journalism which (in my mind, correctly) calls out Hillary Clinton as being a "sensible, moderate Republican candidate" on policy and predilections. It's quite another when a figure like Bill Kristol - one of the godfathers of the modern American NeoCon movement, and the man responsible for Sarah Palin '08 - chooses to endorse Clinton over Trump over her economic positioning, hawkish foreign policy, and perceived greater amenability to shadowy elites.
In Britain, too, a similar thing happened recently with #Brexit. You had the combined might of the UK Labour Party shackling itself to the brains-trust of the Conservative Party's arch-neoliberal wing in order to frantically attempt to beat out the populist fires that were burning for emancipation from Europe. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn - the much-vaunted and wildly-popular-with-Labour's-base-but-not-its-Caucus institutionally insurgent Labour leader - found himself agreeing in private with personages such as Nigel Farage about the desirability of Euroskepticism.
All across the world, in other words, politics is re-aligning. But, as is ever the case, the political structures and institutions which we've set up over time to represent the wills and concerns of the masses have become too ossified to meaningfully respond or reflect this transition.
And that's perhaps how we best explain the sudden rise of Insurgent Politics in a plethora of polities worldwide. People got fed up with the aforementioned Globalist-oriented and questionably democratic elites having a near monopoly on real political power through weighing heavily upon the agenda of these parties and institutions. So when firebrands, demagogues, or just pure straight-up socialist reformers started rising to prominence and offering "Another Way", or meaningful projection of the concerns and prejudices of ordinary people into the political process ... years if not decades of pent-up populist rage surged in behind them.
Now to be fair, some might argue that this is not always and unilaterally a good thing. New Zealanders, after all, voted in a referendum to re-criminalize homosexuality in the late 1980s - as but one example of why 'too much' democracy can occasionally seem a bad idea. The other issue, of course, is that a Radical 'march through the institutions' almost invariably winds up coming to a shuddering halt at some point prior to the penultimate immanentization of said populist's agenda. Examples of this include the Democratic National Convention conspiring to keep Sanders from winning a Presidential nomination - or, more darkly, the array of 'Deep State' and other coercive measures used to block Alexis Tsipras & SYRIZA from stabbing back against the E.U.'s harshly imposed and decidedly undemocratic neoliberal Austerity agenda in Greece.
You could presumably file the Western-backed armed coups against Chile's Salvador Allende and Iran's Mohammed Mossaddeq in the same box - and ditto for the more relatively recent overthrow of the popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt by the Egyptian Army.
It's not so much that Western Democracy doesn't like competitors. It's that the elites we're talking about aren't very great fans of democracy at all.
We can see perhaps similar trends here at home in our own politics. On a smaller scale, it's stuff like the National Party using an obscure veto power to block democratically passed laws it doesn't like from taking effect - or refusing to put certain controversial globalist concerns like the TPPA to any form of vote in Parliament at all to begin with. Larger efforts include attempts to firestorm certain individual and parties out of further participation in politics in the hopes of keeping populist rage safely WELL away from the actual levers of political power. The efficacy of direct efforts on this front have been somewhat questionable (hence why New Zealand First has been surging in the polls of late) - but due to the peculiarities of the New Zealand national character and political landscape, they do not need to be too inordinately successful in order to accomplish their craven aim.
For here in Kiwiland, the dominant paradigm is not yet one of Globalist-Elite versus Nationalist-Worker - or, for that matter, anything so Romantic in ordination. Instead, we are stuck with a sustained struggle in which the two major players appear to be between the aforementioned Globalists on one hand ... and acrid, rank apathy on the other.
So long as that latter force remains such a piercing colossus within our politics, the emerging realignment which we have so viscerally seen elsewhere (and which New Zealanders have, ourselves, previously flirted with) shall largely remain more chrysalis than crystallized.
Still, that's the thing about seismic movements in politics. The fault-lines upon which tectonic upheaval is fomented can quite comfortably exist concealed from the peaceable hamlets that have been built above them.
The only difference between these and the more obviously visually apparent fissures is the level of energy which is thus built up before being unleashed.
Something similar to this is what gave rise to Trumpamania, Feeling the Bern, and #Brexit across the rest of the Anglosphere.
I can't help but wonder what our own dramatic political insurgency might look like. Or, for that matter, what he smokes.
Instead, this fault-line or fissure runs along a far broader front. Whether you wish to delineate the two major oppositional forces as being Globalists versus Protectionists in an economic sense, or Elitists versus Populist-Democrats in an electoral one ... it has become painfully clear over the last year or two of strange rumblings in the politisphere that the paradigms with which we used to broadly conceptualize politics have become painfully inadequate.
New Zealand, perhaps surprisingly, has lead the way and crested the charge on this. Back when the Neoliberal Revolution became truly Institutionalized with Ruthanasia in the early 1990s, it created a situation wherein both the major parties of both nominal Left and suddenly avowed Right came together to jointly uphold our newfound More-Market and Less-Human economic consensus. This necessitated the coagulation of oppositional forces drawn from right across the ordinary political spectrum in order to oppose same - and lest you think I'm talking about New Zealand First, consider for a moment the number of ex-National Party MPs who found themselves part and party to The Alliance.
Something similar has recently become apparent in the gladiator-pit of American politics, too. There, it's the perhaps surprising degree of policy convergence between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in opposition to the economics of globalization that's collectively sold out several generations of American workers - and in joint support of anti-elitist populist politics - which sets the ground for viewing this strange synthesis.
Although it's the forces arraying themselves in opposition to BOTH of them which prove that we really have arrived at a curious place in modern politics. It's one thing to read a semi-snarky piece of principled journalism which (in my mind, correctly) calls out Hillary Clinton as being a "sensible, moderate Republican candidate" on policy and predilections. It's quite another when a figure like Bill Kristol - one of the godfathers of the modern American NeoCon movement, and the man responsible for Sarah Palin '08 - chooses to endorse Clinton over Trump over her economic positioning, hawkish foreign policy, and perceived greater amenability to shadowy elites.
In Britain, too, a similar thing happened recently with #Brexit. You had the combined might of the UK Labour Party shackling itself to the brains-trust of the Conservative Party's arch-neoliberal wing in order to frantically attempt to beat out the populist fires that were burning for emancipation from Europe. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn - the much-vaunted and wildly-popular-with-Labour's-base-but-not-its-Caucus institutionally insurgent Labour leader - found himself agreeing in private with personages such as Nigel Farage about the desirability of Euroskepticism.
All across the world, in other words, politics is re-aligning. But, as is ever the case, the political structures and institutions which we've set up over time to represent the wills and concerns of the masses have become too ossified to meaningfully respond or reflect this transition.
And that's perhaps how we best explain the sudden rise of Insurgent Politics in a plethora of polities worldwide. People got fed up with the aforementioned Globalist-oriented and questionably democratic elites having a near monopoly on real political power through weighing heavily upon the agenda of these parties and institutions. So when firebrands, demagogues, or just pure straight-up socialist reformers started rising to prominence and offering "Another Way", or meaningful projection of the concerns and prejudices of ordinary people into the political process ... years if not decades of pent-up populist rage surged in behind them.
Now to be fair, some might argue that this is not always and unilaterally a good thing. New Zealanders, after all, voted in a referendum to re-criminalize homosexuality in the late 1980s - as but one example of why 'too much' democracy can occasionally seem a bad idea. The other issue, of course, is that a Radical 'march through the institutions' almost invariably winds up coming to a shuddering halt at some point prior to the penultimate immanentization of said populist's agenda. Examples of this include the Democratic National Convention conspiring to keep Sanders from winning a Presidential nomination - or, more darkly, the array of 'Deep State' and other coercive measures used to block Alexis Tsipras & SYRIZA from stabbing back against the E.U.'s harshly imposed and decidedly undemocratic neoliberal Austerity agenda in Greece.
You could presumably file the Western-backed armed coups against Chile's Salvador Allende and Iran's Mohammed Mossaddeq in the same box - and ditto for the more relatively recent overthrow of the popularly elected Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt by the Egyptian Army.
It's not so much that Western Democracy doesn't like competitors. It's that the elites we're talking about aren't very great fans of democracy at all.
We can see perhaps similar trends here at home in our own politics. On a smaller scale, it's stuff like the National Party using an obscure veto power to block democratically passed laws it doesn't like from taking effect - or refusing to put certain controversial globalist concerns like the TPPA to any form of vote in Parliament at all to begin with. Larger efforts include attempts to firestorm certain individual and parties out of further participation in politics in the hopes of keeping populist rage safely WELL away from the actual levers of political power. The efficacy of direct efforts on this front have been somewhat questionable (hence why New Zealand First has been surging in the polls of late) - but due to the peculiarities of the New Zealand national character and political landscape, they do not need to be too inordinately successful in order to accomplish their craven aim.
For here in Kiwiland, the dominant paradigm is not yet one of Globalist-Elite versus Nationalist-Worker - or, for that matter, anything so Romantic in ordination. Instead, we are stuck with a sustained struggle in which the two major players appear to be between the aforementioned Globalists on one hand ... and acrid, rank apathy on the other.
So long as that latter force remains such a piercing colossus within our politics, the emerging realignment which we have so viscerally seen elsewhere (and which New Zealanders have, ourselves, previously flirted with) shall largely remain more chrysalis than crystallized.
Still, that's the thing about seismic movements in politics. The fault-lines upon which tectonic upheaval is fomented can quite comfortably exist concealed from the peaceable hamlets that have been built above them.
The only difference between these and the more obviously visually apparent fissures is the level of energy which is thus built up before being unleashed.
Something similar to this is what gave rise to Trumpamania, Feeling the Bern, and #Brexit across the rest of the Anglosphere.
I can't help but wonder what our own dramatic political insurgency might look like. Or, for that matter, what he smokes.
Monday, July 11, 2016
Sex, Drugs & Electoral Rolls Part XIII: The Newest Political Weapon
Isn't
it funny how conceptions in politics change. Thirty years ago, National was the
party of state ownership, the command economy, and fervent - ferocious -
opposition to the onslaught of Neoliberalism.
Two years ago, what you might term to be "Euroskepticism" was a pretty common left-wing position. Especially in light of what the E.U. Troika were doing to Greece, as well as the Austerity agendas being meted out in Spain and other Mediterranean member-states, this seemed entirely concordant with what we'd conventionally understand as a "progressive", "left-wing" or even "socialist" position. And presumably explains why the reaction to these forces came from the left.
But flash forward a mere twenty four months - or possibly even twelve months given the somewhat disappointing SYRIZA 'last stand' against Austerity in Greece was carried out about this time last year - and you find a very, very different picture.
I wrote an article mere hours after #Brexit became reality in which I passionately argued that the referendum result represented a striking blow against one of the world's foremost and most powerful ardent-neoliberal institutions. I pointed out that the same supernational structure directly responsible for the present economic chaos in at least a half a dozen countries - and who repeatedly forced less well off economies to embark upon a series of quite frankly ruinous and anti-worker fiscal implosions - was now in panic mode. That ordinary people - many if not most of them working people and other less well off voters - had managed to take back some measure of control of their own economic and political destiny from nefarious forces ranging from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan (who donated handsomely to the "Remain" campaign) through to the collected might of many of the most reactionary elements inside the UK Conservative Party.
It was shortly after that that I was told I was defending and equivocating racism - nothing more, nothing less.
And to be fair, there has been a marked and well reported upon upswing in racialine incidents in the UK since the vote came in. There's a clear linkage here - and there ought to be an even clearer condemnation.
But if you can count on one thing in politics, it's the steadfast reductionism of a large, substantial - even multiplanar - set of diverse elements which go into making an event ... into a single-dimensioned one-issue soundbite which is far easier to disseminate and much simpler to understand and internalize for external observers.
This is how you wind up with things like the Iraq War: an extraordinarily complex and multifaceted situation is reduced down to "we're fighting evil", and suddenly ten million rednecks are up in arms clamoring to invade a former US client-state which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
The above briefest of examples also helps to elucidate another important truth about this kind of reductionism in politics. It's not just a function of the sixty-second news-cycle; nor even the much-vaunted declining IQs and attention-spans of voters. Instead, it's an actively weaponized tactic & technique frequently deployed by right-wing forces who know they're on shaky ground with an issue, yet want to lure in outside support for whichever deleterious agenda or policy they're pushing.
We've seen it repeatedly recently with New Zealand politics. If you opposed the TPPA, it wasn't because you were sketch about surrendering our sovereignty to US-based multinationals. It was because you were a Xenophobe. On Auckland house-prices, the same thing happened. Never mind that bastion of unreconstructed marxist ideological revolutionary insurgency the Reserve Bank coming out and openly stating that immigration flows were having an impact on housing affordability (or a simple number-crunch with a pocket calculator noting that the net migration inflow into Auckland was almost ten times the number of new houses built might indicate something of a demand-side problem) - if you were leery about something that's quite clearly going on right before our collective very eyes like the steady stream of foreign buyers pushing up house-prices ... it was quite clearly because you were racist and more specifically Sinophobic. Same deal if you were uneasy about the escalating foreign ownership of our nation's farmland and other assets.
As you can see, the line that criticism of a neoliberal policy thrust is somehow axiomatically racist in both impetus and ambit is now a favoured tool of the Right. This is for two simple reasons. First up, it's a nice way of securing the moral high ground from which to mount vigorous counter-attacks (because nobody likes a racist nor wants to be affiliated with them in public - at least in theory and in polite company); and second, because concern about racism has historically been very much a left-wing and progressive demesne.
Making solidly economic issues into unbearably racist ones is therefore a most efficient form of "culture-jamming" for our Neoliberal Overlords; because it manages to divide 'the left' against itself through pitting two strongly left-wing concerns against one another in the minds of activists.
We thus wind up with the present situation wherein it's not even possible to have a legitimate debate, in the eyes of some, over what Brexit might mean or how we do something about one of the lead drivers of housing unaffordability without a certain crew customarily domiciled down in the intellectual peanut gallery self-righteously taking it upon themselves to call a halt to the whole thing because it uncomfortably intersects with their thought-plane in a jarring manner.
Now you'll note I used the word "debate". That's because I genuinely believe that it's perfectly possible for a reasonably intelligent human being to hold several different thoughts in their head at the same time without suffering from an intellectual migraine and having to collapse everything down to a questionably true singularity.
In that spirit, it is therefore not just possible but outright desirable for concerned citoyens to believe that some of the people who voted for #Brexit did so out of xenophobic or outright racist motivations ... but that the referendum result might ALSO nevertheless be something of a Good Thing from a left-wing perspective.
It's exactly the same sort of logic which allows us to concede that a certain portion of the Green Party's vote comes from chemtrail enthusiast anti-vax crystal healing weirdos (to a sufficient extent that one of their own MPs felt compelled to advocate homeopathy as a serious solution for Ebola) ... yet at the same time recognize that the Greens' presence in Parliament is, arguably, something of a serious victory for science and technology in many areas and that they have a meaningful contribution to make when it comes to, say, evidence-based climate or environment policy.
We don't throw out the conclusions or the impact they can have simply because some of the people who've helped to make it happen are, to put it bluntly, scientifically objectionable outlier wingnuts.
And yet, that seems to be exactly the sort of false equivalency we're being asked to draw with movements like Brexit. That you're either mad-down for antidemocratic neoliberal austerity-boots-on-yer-face-forever ... or you're with the racists.
Somewhere out there, I am convinced, Crosby-Textor or somebody is dramatically overjoyed at having finally found the ideal way to use leftist-logic against us in a bid to force us to side with The Right and vote or agitate against our own political interests.
Two years ago, what you might term to be "Euroskepticism" was a pretty common left-wing position. Especially in light of what the E.U. Troika were doing to Greece, as well as the Austerity agendas being meted out in Spain and other Mediterranean member-states, this seemed entirely concordant with what we'd conventionally understand as a "progressive", "left-wing" or even "socialist" position. And presumably explains why the reaction to these forces came from the left.
But flash forward a mere twenty four months - or possibly even twelve months given the somewhat disappointing SYRIZA 'last stand' against Austerity in Greece was carried out about this time last year - and you find a very, very different picture.
I wrote an article mere hours after #Brexit became reality in which I passionately argued that the referendum result represented a striking blow against one of the world's foremost and most powerful ardent-neoliberal institutions. I pointed out that the same supernational structure directly responsible for the present economic chaos in at least a half a dozen countries - and who repeatedly forced less well off economies to embark upon a series of quite frankly ruinous and anti-worker fiscal implosions - was now in panic mode. That ordinary people - many if not most of them working people and other less well off voters - had managed to take back some measure of control of their own economic and political destiny from nefarious forces ranging from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan (who donated handsomely to the "Remain" campaign) through to the collected might of many of the most reactionary elements inside the UK Conservative Party.
It was shortly after that that I was told I was defending and equivocating racism - nothing more, nothing less.
And to be fair, there has been a marked and well reported upon upswing in racialine incidents in the UK since the vote came in. There's a clear linkage here - and there ought to be an even clearer condemnation.
But if you can count on one thing in politics, it's the steadfast reductionism of a large, substantial - even multiplanar - set of diverse elements which go into making an event ... into a single-dimensioned one-issue soundbite which is far easier to disseminate and much simpler to understand and internalize for external observers.
This is how you wind up with things like the Iraq War: an extraordinarily complex and multifaceted situation is reduced down to "we're fighting evil", and suddenly ten million rednecks are up in arms clamoring to invade a former US client-state which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
The above briefest of examples also helps to elucidate another important truth about this kind of reductionism in politics. It's not just a function of the sixty-second news-cycle; nor even the much-vaunted declining IQs and attention-spans of voters. Instead, it's an actively weaponized tactic & technique frequently deployed by right-wing forces who know they're on shaky ground with an issue, yet want to lure in outside support for whichever deleterious agenda or policy they're pushing.
We've seen it repeatedly recently with New Zealand politics. If you opposed the TPPA, it wasn't because you were sketch about surrendering our sovereignty to US-based multinationals. It was because you were a Xenophobe. On Auckland house-prices, the same thing happened. Never mind that bastion of unreconstructed marxist ideological revolutionary insurgency the Reserve Bank coming out and openly stating that immigration flows were having an impact on housing affordability (or a simple number-crunch with a pocket calculator noting that the net migration inflow into Auckland was almost ten times the number of new houses built might indicate something of a demand-side problem) - if you were leery about something that's quite clearly going on right before our collective very eyes like the steady stream of foreign buyers pushing up house-prices ... it was quite clearly because you were racist and more specifically Sinophobic. Same deal if you were uneasy about the escalating foreign ownership of our nation's farmland and other assets.
As you can see, the line that criticism of a neoliberal policy thrust is somehow axiomatically racist in both impetus and ambit is now a favoured tool of the Right. This is for two simple reasons. First up, it's a nice way of securing the moral high ground from which to mount vigorous counter-attacks (because nobody likes a racist nor wants to be affiliated with them in public - at least in theory and in polite company); and second, because concern about racism has historically been very much a left-wing and progressive demesne.
Making solidly economic issues into unbearably racist ones is therefore a most efficient form of "culture-jamming" for our Neoliberal Overlords; because it manages to divide 'the left' against itself through pitting two strongly left-wing concerns against one another in the minds of activists.
We thus wind up with the present situation wherein it's not even possible to have a legitimate debate, in the eyes of some, over what Brexit might mean or how we do something about one of the lead drivers of housing unaffordability without a certain crew customarily domiciled down in the intellectual peanut gallery self-righteously taking it upon themselves to call a halt to the whole thing because it uncomfortably intersects with their thought-plane in a jarring manner.
Now you'll note I used the word "debate". That's because I genuinely believe that it's perfectly possible for a reasonably intelligent human being to hold several different thoughts in their head at the same time without suffering from an intellectual migraine and having to collapse everything down to a questionably true singularity.
In that spirit, it is therefore not just possible but outright desirable for concerned citoyens to believe that some of the people who voted for #Brexit did so out of xenophobic or outright racist motivations ... but that the referendum result might ALSO nevertheless be something of a Good Thing from a left-wing perspective.
It's exactly the same sort of logic which allows us to concede that a certain portion of the Green Party's vote comes from chemtrail enthusiast anti-vax crystal healing weirdos (to a sufficient extent that one of their own MPs felt compelled to advocate homeopathy as a serious solution for Ebola) ... yet at the same time recognize that the Greens' presence in Parliament is, arguably, something of a serious victory for science and technology in many areas and that they have a meaningful contribution to make when it comes to, say, evidence-based climate or environment policy.
We don't throw out the conclusions or the impact they can have simply because some of the people who've helped to make it happen are, to put it bluntly, scientifically objectionable outlier wingnuts.
And yet, that seems to be exactly the sort of false equivalency we're being asked to draw with movements like Brexit. That you're either mad-down for antidemocratic neoliberal austerity-boots-on-yer-face-forever ... or you're with the racists.
Somewhere out there, I am convinced, Crosby-Textor or somebody is dramatically overjoyed at having finally found the ideal way to use leftist-logic against us in a bid to force us to side with The Right and vote or agitate against our own political interests.
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