Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society. It's a bad take but probably one that needs to be kept in mind.

I think this view is very widespread. I used to work in a call-centre, the staff overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly working class, mostly female, the people running the place and making decisions were remote and rarely communicated with us directly, but were palpably more middle class, and overwhelmingly male. Pretty much the defining feature of the place was that we were constantly being ordered to carry out our work duties in ways which seemed obviously counterproductive, or which seemed to have been decided by people who didn't properly understand what was going on at the customer facing end of the business. Instructions on how to do certain tasks were constantly being changed or completely reversed, usually with no explanation to us of why, people were very aware that they were not judged important enough for it to be worth explaining why a procedure had been changed, they were just told to get on with it. The general atmosphere was one of sullen acquiescence and resentment. Every year we would have this mandatory diversity training course and it was the exact same thing: being talked down to by middle class people, my co-workers often (genuinely imo) did not understand why certain things we were warned against were offensive, but there way a sullen acceptance and knowledge that arguing about it would not make any difference, awareness that they were not important enough to be given explanations why certain things were wrong beyond "because I say so", and the griping in private after it was finished. News stories about some celebrity being censured for a politically incorrect gaffe would be received in a similar way, as some remote capricious authority coming down on people for not following a set of incomprehensible and nonsensical rules. And a lot, most, of these people did have ugly hateful, racist views that needed challenging, I don't know how you go about challenging those without reinforcing this resentment.

A lot of them had positive things to say about UKIP, though I get the impression that most of them thought the party was too incompetent to vote for. I imagine that a lot of them voted for brexit, and that this idea of a remote incomprehensible bureaucracy that was dictating their lives would have resonated with them.

Alternatives to neo-liberalism, ones that are more humane and people-focused, need a rebranding. In the US words like "communism" and "socialism" carry too much baggage, especially since they carry the legacy of failed states and atrocities. I remember joining the YCL in 7th grade in the 90s during my more idealistic days, and dropped out in high school because a lot of people won't buy anything with the word "communism" or "socialism" attached to it. It's dead the in water, it was back then, and it still is today.

What I realized back then, and I still think it's true now, is that something entirely new needs to be created with new terminology. Until that happens I doubt we'll get our better alternatives.

it's striking if you try to compare the rise of populist authoritarian politics now bears with the 20s&30s bc the people drawn to it now are living vastly more comfortable lives in much more stable polities. people are awful at realising in what respects they've got a good deal.

been really fascinated by this idea for a while. how do you square the generalized anxiety in the air with the historically unprecedented levels of comfort and security? (this does not, obviously, apply to everyone but it does apply to most white people in, say, wisconsin.) the day to day experience of risk is low, and yet we are beset with overwhelming fears of catastrophic risk, system failure, encroaching dark futures. there's something about the current order that needs individuals to persist in a heightened state of alertness and anxiety in a way that i've been trying to track back to the protestant ethic but you needn't really get that academic about it. when people are pulled away from each other, when all we have is a cult of individual entrepreneurship, the result is this lonely anxious misery which inevitably finds its ready outlets. it's not just poverty imo, it's a kind of fear that and isolation that runs deeper.

Isn't this why inequality (within a given polity) is more poisonous than a notional standard of living, expressed globally?

I was talking to my therapist a bit about this last night. I experience tremendous anxiety despite living an extraordinarily comfortable life and I think some of it is that in my gut I realize how tenuous and fragile society and our stability is and so this comfort almost feels like a forgery or a mirage - it's illusory and I'm constantly waiting for the fog to lift and see that no, actually we now live in the apocalypse. I wonder how much that is true for a lot of people - that it's not /normal/ to be so safe and so it feels like it can't be real. The other big component I think is the West's cult of individuality and the general lack of sittlichtkeit that people have. It seems like so many ppl feel alienated from their families and their communities. You hear all the time about how it used to be that everyone knew their neighbors and now no one knows their neighbors, etc. That kind of loneliness I agree probably has something to do with it. I think maybe the third thing is just that we have failed to provide meaning for people - we have mostly let religion become a side project that is less and less relevant to people's day to day life and we don't have much in the way of national cohesiveness. I remember reading that Israelis have some of the highest reported rates of happiness in the world because they believe that where they are and what they are doing and what they are a part of is important and meaningful.

idk, ryan I think a lot of this overlaps with your post but some stray thoughts on the topic. I remember we discussed this question a little bit on the political philosophy thread not that long ago?

as an addendum: i don't know how afraid to be but the apocalyptic reaction on the left strikes me as possibly just feeding the same beast that's causing all this. i choose to be optimistic and see this moment as the traumatic birth of a new progressive political movement--hopefully a ferocious one. here, now, is a moment to articulate alternatives.

I was listening to an interesting interview with someone (possibly Alex Zaitchik) who said that a lot of the Trump supporters he spoke to saw 'political correctness' not as a tool for combating racism but as a shared language used by liberals both to mask their own racism and to exclude anyone who didn't 'get it' from polite society.

this is not so far out of step with how the term was originally used by leftists

that's all very well said, mordy. i lead a reasonably comfortable life too and suffer from lots of anxiety. part of my way of coping with it is to academically study the sociological roots of it. i'd like to go back to the likes of christopher lasch, auden's "age of anxiety," more weber, etc.

we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath.

we have mostly let religion become a side project that is less and less relevant to people's day to day life

Or see it primarily as a weapon used by the right.

I absolutely get the lack of community as a driver of anxiety though - I live in a university town 2,000 miles from where I grew up. Nobody I know (primarily university faculty and staff) is from here originally, and the school is just big and well-known enough that everyone always has one foot out the door thinking they could end up somewhere even bigger or more prestigious; my wife is being recruited by two places right now, both much larger and one of them is probably top three in her field prestige-wise.

So nobody has any real long term community, or never puts down roots that go too deep. I know my neighbors fairly well, but they're all in the same situation - always pondering the next move. It makes me feel constantly edgy and unsettled despite having an objectively worry-free life.

"we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath."

or other ways of living those practices. See Charles Taylor's Ethics of Authenticity (originally The Malaises of Modernity) and A Catholic Modernity, and his A Secular Age for an even fuller story. Weber is important here.

I imagine that a lot of them voted for brexit, and that this idea of a remote incomprehensible bureaucracy that was dictating their lives would have resonated with them.

I read a thing correlating Brexit voting with an external "locus of control", the belief that you don't have much control over the things that happen in your day-to-day life:
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/brexit-britain-british-election-study-insights-from-the-post-eu-referendum-wave-of-the-bes-internet-panel/#.WCTq9_mLTIU

which I found interesting though I'm not sure how much can be read into it

(in general psychological terms I have a p. external LoC myself and kind of think "I have no control over the direction my life or anything else in this country is going in, so it would be nice if there was a structure outside this insane country to appeal to")

thanks Euler for the reccs! will check those out.

yes - the death/absence of faith is v important. I feel like a patronizing dick when I tell people who have faith that I admire it but don't share it, but the problem I think isn't insincerity but an inability to articulate a secular equivalent. And I think we really need a secular equivalent

yeah I mean I'm a practicing Catholic and I think secular alternatives are needed too

I really hate to link to the_donald on here, so I'll just screenshot this to show you what they are up to today. Yeah, it's beyond grim.

http://i.imgur.com/lYCrktY.jpg

Thanks for sharing that. They understand that the stakes are worldwide so we should too. I've been doing a lot of thinking along the lines of what this means for the international order going forward. I feel like no one really bothered to think through it because no one really expected Trump to win. What will be the role of the UN and will it continue to exist / what is the new role of international authority / will all international relationships now boil down to might makes right. And what are the consequences of that for every major current geopolitical tension dormant and active? I think I read today that Trump was already making conciliatory gestures towards NATO and our Asian allies?

I think there's still an underlying assumption - and I'm probably clinging to it - that Trump will be reined in by the orthodoxy

even the Republican orthodoxy though could seriously upend things. how long have they been calling for us to kick out the UN or withdraw funding? they like NATO because they like putting pressure on Russia but they dgaf about 99% of international diplomacy otherwise

i dont know about "reined in" but it's really less trump himself who scares me (i think he's a psychologically weak person and it's probably dawning on him at this very minute that he doesn't want this job anymore--he clearly has no capacity or patience for it) but the monstrous true-believer hacks to which he will delegate his authority. he strikes me as a fairly easy person to manipulate. he will be a weak president, but that doesn't mean his administration will be, unfortunately. the best case scenario strikes me as most likely: a really bad republican administration of the likes we have experienced before but one that will get rolled "bigly" in 2/4 years. (this is me bargaining with the future)

(i mean, im no expert on this stuff, but there's certainly a way of interpreting the results of the election that spell major trouble for the GOP very soon. this crazy election was the 10% chance and it paid off for them...that kind of "luck" wont repeat itself) (again indulging myself here)

another way of putting that is that it's hard to say it's a right wing "wave" when it's more or less the same minority of people who always vote republican who turned out. there was just inexplicable complacency on the other side. if trump pulled obama numbers i'd say otherwise.

midterms not looking that great for gems http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-election-results-senate-20161108-story.html

incumbents usually win elections and in the next presidential election president trump will have the republican machine behind him 100%

we have no idea who the democrat candidate will be

lol dems even

Yeah don't get me wrong a lot of the Republican orthodoxy is definitely more noxious than Trump, this is cold comfort

I'm not articulating fully cos I'm on my phone in the pub

piaooc but its all <3

I think there's still an underlying assumption - and I'm probably clinging to it - that Trump will be reined in by the orthodoxy

the opposite is more likely

I've been doing a lot of thinking along the lines of what this means for the international order going forward

fracturing of international alliances
controls on movements of capital, goods and people
less "interventionist" war, more straight-up "give us that" war (more war overall)
persecution of ethnic minorities worldwide
general abandoment of human decency

it's bad

the concept of nations allying will not end - there will be new/different alliances. maybe more isolationism but country's interests will continue to overlap.

this comfort almost feels like a forgery or a mirage - it's illusory and I'm constantly waiting for the fog to lift and see that no, actually we now live in the apocalypse

idk how far you can go with this before it becomes straight delusional. yr describing the plot of the matrix. idk I am not an anxious person at all and I think you can normally tell from hearing people mull over politics if they are. the idea that spiritual community performs a unique and essential role is politically conservative and imo deeply unhistorical. the social worlds my ancestors inhabited were much poorer, blander, restricted and fearful (they couldn't have any intercontinental back and forth like this for one). I don't think the fact that they would have considered themselves to be more in touch with god made their lives more meaningful. this seems like quite a tangent to a general rightwards drift in any case, I don't think it lines up very well with the demographics we're worrying about

Maybe Matrix-like in the sense that living in such comfort while so much of the world does not is a kind of false reality about the nature of life [for most humans]. But that wasn't what I meant - I meant that society and civilization seem very stable. We go about our lives assuming that the government will continue to function, that the businesses will remain open, that the banks will have money. But we know that societies can crumble and quickly and almost without warning. Look around the world. Look at history. Stability is a rarity. That's what I was pointing to - not that this stability is fake; it is real. I was pointing out that this stability is fragile and foolish to trust as permanent. It's more like waiting for a second shoe to drop sort of dynamic.

most of human history has been tediously stable, mainly just due the slow rate of change and development. people were understandably more aware of their mortality, but empires lasted over 1000 years, and for most of our history the whole idea of progress/development/the zeitgeist/the tech tree from civilization was absent.

it depends what sort of collapse you're worried about. the modern world has increasingly become m/l one big interconnected network over the past 500 years, and understanding the implications of that is where I part company with alt-right types who cling to some sort of essential human tribalism (which apparently operates on the level of westphalian sovereignty). there is more shared interest than ever before, and the population explosion also has the effect of further diffusing crises imo. I think any economic or political collapse would not be both global and sudden. the global system is too vast and complex. so I can worry about supernovas or nuclear idiocy but I think humanity has solved the barbarian issue and global totalitarianism would require an unprecedented and currently infeasible level of coordination

Keep in mind I may have a drastically different perspective on the stability of human history than you bc of my background.

My family didn't get here very long ago, it wasn't great where they were coming from and they didn't hadn't gotten there too much longer before that. It's not hyperbole to say that my grandparents' lives were far more turbulent and dangerous than I can even relate to.

But even if you're family is from a long standing Western nation that is relatively stable WW2 was not long ago. Bloody revolutions throughout the Western world, from France to the US to Russia, are only a couple hundred years old. Before there are long periods of war and instability. I'm not sure I buy this notion of "most of human history has been tediously stable."

your*

yeah I appreciate that, & ofc I'm not saying there's no need to worry about nationalism or genocide. grand scale civilizational collapse being much more difficult than ever before obviously doesn't reduce individual, community, national or regional level risks

I've been doing a lot of thinking along the lines of what this means for the international order going forward
fracturing of international alliances
controls on movements of capital, goods and people
less "interventionist" war, more straight-up "give us that" war (more war overall)
persecution of ethnic minorities worldwide
general abandoment of human decency

it's bad

― it me

otm :(

this is a total tangent but trying to account for the pull (or lack of pull) of the idea of apocalypse is interesting. I think what makes modern atrocities so real and alarming to me is exactly the fact that they are so easily accommodated within the world system. knowing that people who have committed genocide are living lives in many ways v similar to mine is unsettling in a way remote historical atrocities can't be. in a sense that's similar to mordy's worry - that civilization is a facade that doesn't really insulate you

I think any economic or political collapse would not be both global and sudden. the global system is too vast and complex.

OTOH, I have no problem believing in a sudden domino effect resulting from climate change. Sea water overrunning Bangladesh rice production, desert areas becoming uninhabitable from the heat. Pretty much anything we're talking about in the global warming thread could bring about rapid change.

This movie to thread: The Act of Killing - 2013 Documentary

xp

"we need marxism without history, christianity without god, a pragmatism of compassion. not holding my breath."

Ryan otm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-stone/history-tells-us-what-will-brexit-trump_b_11179774.html

seems plausible tbh

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way  —  all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say, “Oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??” But they don’t realize that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.

Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.
An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honor NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends “peace keeping forces” and “aid lorries” into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He cedes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?

This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.

definitely Russian expansion is a very worrying scenario that doesn't appear to be on a lot of people's radars at the moment

Putin will def press his hand and outsmart Trump otoh he seems smart enough to not risk an actual nuclear exchange which he would have no hope of winning

This is completely moronic for any number of reasons.

definitely Russian expansion is a very worrying scenario that doesn't appear to be on a lot of people's radars at the moment

It's on people's radars over here.

It's a shame to pluck one idiotic whimsy from the rest but the leader of Poland thinks every other leader of Poland since independence is a Stasi agent and Putin killed his twin brother. They are literally more anti Russian than Ukraine.

LOL, Poland pro-Russian, that'll be the day!