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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