Is the West Experiencing a Right-Wing Drift?

You did have oddballs on both sides but if they're packing Nazi insignia it's a fair bet they were Azov or aligned.

Politico seems to have been the original source of error. The wording they used - "participated in the Russian-backed insurgency" - might be a case of their house style guide mandating "Russian-backed insurgency" instead of "war" - but it's absolutely misleading in this context.

I trawled a few Italian newspapers for more info on this and none of them mention which side the suspects fought for. So unless English-language media outlets know something their Italian colleagues don't, this does seem to be a case of leaping to conclusions.

https://www.thenationalherald.com/253767/setting-golden-dawn-having-trouble-paying-rent/

ATHENS – Bounced out of the Greek Parliament in July 7 snap elections after falling out of favor with voters, the accused neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, with all its 15 lawmakers on trial on charges of running a criminal gang, can’t afford the rent on its headquarters.

Unfortunately most of their voters have been lured back to the right-wing party they were originally supporters of - now in power.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-how-ultranationalists-infiltrated-greece-s-new-ruling-party-1.7485494

guys

A “woman-first feminist social network” launched on the Gab Social open source code today, becoming the 2nd largest Gab Social server instantly.

Tell me again how Gab is for the “far-right” only.

This is the future: decentralized, open source, unstoppable, for everyone. pic.twitter.com/TkmFhRayZA

— Gab.com (@getongab) August 12, 2019

can you give some more context there? is this a rightward drift, or?

Spinsterf

tldr: "gab" is a right/alt-right social media network. they have now launched a women's version (?) AND THEY HAVE CALLED IT "SPINSTER"

a TERF version, aiui

there's still maybe a right-wing drift in the west but i feel like even more of a characterization of politics in the west atm is a total inability to accomplish anything or lead in any kind of meaningful way. the US is terribly dysfunctional in this regard and you might say it's specific to our system but the UK seems no better (assuming this election returns another Tory gov that'll be what- 3 in a row elected without a clear path to enacting Brexit?), and Israel is heading into its third election. the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like. maybe this is the truth about politics in our age - not a drift to the right or left but just drifting?

Brexit requires others outside of the U.K. to play along. A substantial Tory majority would likely still see them tripping over their own feet, to some extent, wrt negotiations with the EU, attempting to balance rhetoric with adherence to international obligations, etc, but they’d be able to force through a raft of right-wing domestic policy. In the specific context of the U.K., the left has moved noticeably to the left but it’s often underestimated how far the right is moving to the right - culling MPs seen as too moderate, trying to ignite a US-style culture war, positioning the importance of their ability to govern effectively as more important than maintaining constitutional checks and balances, governing transparently, following the rule of law, and so on. Up to now, the resurgent left has partly hampered the effectiveness of the right but a huge factor was lack of cohesion within the Tory party. They’re set to be much more ruthless and bound by internal loyalty this time around.

the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like

I think Modi is an exception to this statement, but I also think the extremely long-term rise to power of the RSS & BJP (and, especially, the way they've infiltrated civil society over the decades) shows why some of the other autocrats are less successful. The need a cult of personality leader but you also need organization

The far-right government party in Estonia has attracted some attention, less so in Latvia, I think. This is not good:

https://en.rebaltica.lv/2019/12/azov-movements-race-war-plans-find-sympathetic-audience-in-latvian-government-party

Logo something of a tip off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Alliance_(Latvia)#/media/File%3ANacionālā_Apvienība_(National_Alliance)_logo.svg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Alliance_(Latvia)#/media/File%3ANacionālā_Apvienība_(National_Alliance)_logo.svg

there's still maybe a right-wing drift in the west but i feel like even more of a characterization of politics in the west atm is a total inability to accomplish anything or lead in any kind of meaningful way. the US is terribly dysfunctional in this regard and you might say it's specific to our system but the UK seems no better (assuming this election returns another Tory gov that'll be what- 3 in a row elected without a clear path to enacting Brexit?), and Israel is heading into its third election. the right-wing autocrat-leaning leaders are real but they aren't really good at doing shit it seems like. maybe this is the truth about politics in our age - not a drift to the right or left but just drifting?

― Mordy

this is, imo, sort of the trap of existing systems - the current system of neoliberal democracyish global capitalism was essentially universalized (possibly created) in the '90s. the people who hold those beliefs are unable these days to consistently leverage that system to obtain positions of power, but enough people still accept it as The Way Of Things that nobody has the authority to actively change those norms. i don't think the people in power have an inability to "lead" - given institutions more, uh, amenable to their norms they could do quite a lot of "leading" - but creating that system is quite beyond them. this applies to the left and the right more or less equally, i would argue.

to resort to cliche, things will have to get worse before they can get "better" - in this case meaning merely meaning "functional".

A Danish writer Rune Møller Stahl wrote that we're in what Gramsci called an 'interregnum', a 'nonhegemonic time'. The neoliberal consensus has broken down, but it's still unknown what the way forward is going to be longterm. A resurgence of neoliberalism? Right-wing populism? Left wing neo-keynesian socialism? Nobody really has enough power to do what they want to do yet, so it's all just a frustrating slog. Socialism is going to win out in the end, though, imo. The tools of neo-liberalist economics fundamentally don't seem to work anymore, and the right-wing populist movememt is extremely dangerous, but in the end self-defeating.

It also occurs to me that our new visions of society are for the most part reruns of previous attempts. The big alternative offered by the left (socialism, or communism even) are projects now centuries old. I go between two possibilities for this - one is a sort of political philosophy low hanging fruit. Maybe there are only so many ways to organize society and so we're rehearsing these old debates. The other possibility is just a failure of imagination to think of something new.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out. The problem is the getting of power off those whose present state of living depends on us not having it.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out.

I don't think both of these things can be true.

In this sense the left has its own end of history problem (tho even worse since its biggest projects were the ones discredited by capitalism’s end of history). I don’t personally find “we know how to make a perfect society we just need to get the media on board / wait for old people to die” particularly compelling. The eco leftists also waiting for something else before they can enact utopia (the end of civilization) which gives them some sort of novelty but again there’s nothing really to inspire here just waiting for godot.

Yeah, the new left is obviously looking backwards, how can that even be up for discussion? Corbyn and Sanders are links to the past, warriors who have kept up the good fight since the seventies. And that might be enough, it might be that Mordy's first idea is the right one.

Power needs to be taken, not waited for - I agree!

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out.

I don't think both of these things can be true.

Why not? Borrowing has been low for a decade. We have fully costed plans for radical social transformation from a number of policy research groups, and even a couple of real political parties. Imagination isn't the problem. Practicalities aren't even the problem. But being right, as we appear to be discovering again and again, ISN'T ENOUGH!

I don’t personally find “we know how to make a perfect society we just need to get the media on board / wait for old people to die” particularly compelling.

same

but as ever to me it's clear that post-religious societies would move right, and I know that I'm just pissing in the wind saying this on ILX

TH, what Mordy is saying is that the imagination of the left only amounts to rehashing ideas from ca 1870-1979. What Mordy isn't really saying is that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Mostly young people are floating the ideas and doing the work. Sanders and Corbyn providing periods of leadership doesn't mask that.

Well, that's postmodernism for you

Though I don't think Mordy's really giving fully automated gay luxury communism the credit that's due to it. A few costings still to be worked out there tbf

xpost

Lol. The fully automated gay parts of it are kinda new, yeah. I think if someone from the thirties travelled to this day, they would instinctually understand a lot of the political debates. But show them a picture of the new Finnish cabinet, and they would lose their minds.

Just ignore the dishonest fascist, btw. He has nothing to offer.

Lol Fred how many power naps till the new Star Wars. Looking forward to the Baby Yoda review.

There are new ideas on the left that haven't been tried yet. They're not as well known to the general public, but they have some currency within the new left's discourse. I'm thinking mainly of Murray Bookchin's theory of Communalism, and Abdullah Öcalan's related vision of Democratic Confederalism (currently practiced successfully in Rojava, despite their many enemies). These two visions of society mix ideas from anarchism and socialism to create a "commune of communes", a decentralized, confederated system of local direct democracies.

Others on the left are interested in instituting workplace democracy, another idea that was never tried in past attempts at socialism. This is a popular idea within the DSA.

There is a distinctly libertarian (in the sense of anti-authoritarian) character to the new left that differs from past leftist formulations.

For more info on that workplace democracy bit, see this great Richard Wolff video, Three Basic Kinds of Socialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7x7oVwhHok

'Communalism' sounds like fourierism to me. It sounds more like proto-communism than post-communism.

Anti-authoritarian socialism is... anarchism? It sounds like a return to before the dictatorship of the proletariat became dogma. You're right, onesecondbefore, that it's a road not taken, but I'm not sure I find it 'new'.

Sounds like a fucking nightmare tbh. Any political ideology that doesn’t fully account for the possibility of withdrawal and solitude, silence and marginality, can only become totalitarian in the long run. Every community needs an other.

"Soviet Union" itself m/l meant "union of local workers' councils" tbh.

Please trust me that the one-sentence summaries in my comment are not the totality of these proposed systems. Bookchin wrote several books on Communalism that get into the gritty details. Democratic Confederalism has a several volume set written on it AND a society currently practicing it. Both of these systems are based on the theory of Social Ecology, which is quite robust.

Here's a pamphlet that introduces all of this in a little more detail, if you're interested: https://libcom.org/files/Social%20Ecology%20Pamphlet%20Emily%20McGuire.pdf

Worth mentioning also that one of the reasons Social Ecology is gaining traction in the new left is that it is specifically concerned with averting ecological catastrophe and incorporating ecological thinking into a new kind of society.

For some reason, Post-Scarcity Anarchism was on my Dad's bookshelf so I did read that one as a teenager, at the least.xp

Oh hey, on the last page of that pamphlet it talks about reclaiming Utopian Socialism like Fourierism from Marx. I was kinda right :)

I'm not saying it's bad, OSB, I'm just saying I don't find it particularly new! And I still don't after reading the pamphlet. It says: “I find myself very much in agreement with a past anarchist, Murray Bookchin, who kinda said ‘I think that the future of the left depends crucially on putting together the best of anarchism and the best of Marxism, and unless those two anti-capitalist perspectives can be put together in a political process, the left is doomed to failure.’ He severed himself from the anarchist tradition because he couldn’t stand the dogmatic anarchists. I’ve had a hard time in the Marxist tradition with the dogmatic Marxists. The dogmatic Marxists and the dogmatic anarchists should go to Hell”

I agree with pom, though. I'm not convinced that it sounds appealing to me as a large-scale basis for society; I also think people are underselling the extent to which a number of the 'bad' historical examples of national-level socialism were initially motivated by similar ideals.

The imagination is there. Most of the practicalities have been worked out. The problem is the getting of power off those whose present state of living depends on us not having it.

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand)

actually getting power seems like a pretty pivotal practicality to be worked out. also, there are implicit costs in most of the possible methods of obtaining power that need to be worked out.

i do also note that governance seems a lot easier to people who aren't in a position to do it... maybe indeed "most of the practicalities have been worked out" but i'd need to see that hypothesis tested before i can sign on to that

personally my interest is more in process than in policy, in form rather than in substance, and i can't make any decisions on what that form would look like until i see how far people are willing to go, in practice, in the pursuit of power.

I meant the practicalities of the policies i.e. single-payer health insurance, nationalising the rail system, etc. A lot of the heavy lifting has been done in terms of thinking through what can be done to address society's problems. But yes of course being in position to actually implement these changes is what won't be given up without a very difficult and asymmetrical fight.

There are new ideas on the left that haven't been tried yet. They're not as well known to the general public, but they have some currency within the new left's discourse. I'm thinking mainly of Murray Bookchin's theory of Communalism, and Abdullah Öcalan's related vision of Democratic Confederalism (currently practiced successfully in Rojava, despite their many enemies). These two visions of society mix ideas from anarchism and socialism to create a "commune of communes", a decentralized, confederated system of local direct democracies.

although i am not that well-versed about what's going on in "rojava" i don't really buy öcalan's conversion from being the leader of a classic vanguardist, "democratic" centralist marxist-leninist organization in the 20th century style to now being the prophet/theoretician of some anarcho-communal system, seems sus as fuck.

("rojava" has a lot of the hallmarks of a kurdish ethno-state for starters - in an area with large ethnic diversity)

I think this interview has some applicability outside Israel as well in terms of thinking through questions like false consciousness, group identity and failures of the left: https://www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/elections/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-real-reason-mizrahim-vote-for-netanyahu-and-why-the-left-can-t-win-them-over-1.8378189

Spain bucking the trend: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/8/headlines/spain_poised_to_form_first_progressive_coalition_government_since_1930s

Mizrachi's position is that leftist universalism is just another identity politics, not a meta-politics, and one that isn't being bought by enough Israeli voters to topple Netanyahu.

that is not what i got from the interview -- but yes he does challenge the inevitability with which universalist liberalism understands itself. but i understand it more as he's critiquing universalist liberalism that tries to use tokenism to win votes from mizrahim who are concerned primarily about the ways in which a universalist ideology undermines their own self-conceptions of identity (thru prisms of religion + nationalism).

iow liberalism senses that identity politics is a thing but cynically doesn't understand what makes it a potent force. it's not merely representationism.

right, that seems right. I was trying to think about how to apply the position outside of Israel, where identity is even more multidimensional than in other western places.

I'm interested in the belief in the inevitability of universalist leftism, a belief that I think is false and crippling to attempts to widen the appeal of leftism.

To each their own teleology.