Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: The Twilight of Neoliberalism Page 8 of 12

Covid and China’s Victory

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On January 6, 2022

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One of the most clarifying things about the Covid epidemic has been which countries have been able to handle it and which haven’t.

To oversimplify, China and a few other nations have handled it well. None of the major Western powers have; certainly not the US.

In biology, there’s a distinction between natural selection and sexual selection. In sexual selection, you compete against other members of your species. In natural selection, you compete against your environment.

In nations, societies, and civilizations there is something similar: internal vs. external competition. You compete against fellow members of your society for status, wealth, and power within your society, but your society as a whole competes against other societies. There are always top dogs, hegemonic powers, and so on, and losing an inter-society culture can, at worst, lead to you being genocided and, at best, lead to long periods of poverty and subjugation. (The Irish to the English, say, for hundreds of years. Native Americans to the Europeans. Indeed, almost everyone to the Europeans, but before that there have been various hegemonic powers — including China.)

In the West, with some minor exceptions, Covid was treated as a profit event. It was a way for the richest and most powerful to become even more rich and powerful. That millions would die and millions more would be crippled (Long Covid rates seem somewhere between 10 to 20 percent depending on definitions) was secondary to the possibility of funneling more power and wealth to those who already had the most. Billionaires, just one group among elites, have seen their wealth double during the pandemic.

China, or more accurately, the Chinese Communist Party did not treat the pandemic primarily as being about internal competition. To them it was important that large numbers of citizens did not die and were not disabled.

This means that China will come out of this stronger than the West, because the economy, fundamentally and always, is people, and there’s aren’t mass-disabled and/or dead. Plus the legitimacy of the ruling class, rather than being reduced by their pandemic response, has been increased.

To the CCP, the health of their citizens is integral to maintaining their power. To the West’s elites, it is an asset to be burned down to make more money and improve their internal position.

The irony of this is that by taking care of their citizens, the CCP has both improved their external and internal positions, while the West’s elites, who can be best characterized as incompetent psychopaths capable of nothing but accumulating more internal power and wealth, have been weakened despite their gains in wealth. This is because, as a group, their power is dependent on the health of their population and on their legitimacy.

As far as I can see, Covid pretty much proves that, barring outside shocks, China has already won the hegemonic competition between itself and the US. Oh, it’ll have to play out, but the CCP governs its country basically competently, and US elites are fools who let their society’s power run down.

US military superiority, in the face of nukes and the Russia/China alliance, is insufficient to alter this fact. China has the industry, it has more competent government, and its government’s legitimacy is riding high while the legitimacy of the West is in tatters.

Given these facts, and that China has a much larger population, it’s hard to see how the US can remain in its position. Just as the end of Britain as world ruler took generations after the US actually surpassed it economically, so this will take time to be seen. However, just as, by 1900, it was essentially inevitable that the US would take over from Britain, so it now seems that the hand-off to China is inevitable, or would be in a world without climate change and ecological collapse, those being the likely external shocks that even a functioning society may not be able to overcome.

I take little pleasure in this. I dedicated a decent chunk of my life to trying to help fix the US, as a Canadian-American collapse is likely to be ugly. But it is what it is, and it must be faced squarely.

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Periods of Popular Political Change Happen When…

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On October 25, 2021

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…people recognize that their problems aren’t personal, but social.

Oh this isn’t the only requirement for change, but it is one of the requirements.

In “normal” times most people see their problems as personal: if they’re poor it’s because of something they did or didn’t do, or is related to people around them. “That damned boss.” It isn’t seen as political or structural. The line for much of the 80s-2000s was that Americans saw themselves as “temporarily embarrassed rich people.” If they weren’t making it, the problem wasn’t the politics but theirs. The perception was that anyone could make it. Maybe the system was unfair, but not prohibitively so.

Of course, not all people thought this way (there’s never universal groupthink) but enough did that there was no widespread push for serious changes.

What has changed recently is that people no longer think “its me, not you.” They think, “it’s you, not me” where “you” = society and politics. They may have taken the student loans, but they know boomers paid nothing or a nominal amount for university. They know they can’t afford a home or apartment, not because they don’t earn enough, but because wages have effectively gone down and real home prices have gone up vastly compared to what they were when their parents or grandparents bought up. They know medical care is too expensive and that drugs didn’t used to cost nearly this much.

People, especially young people, are getting that the problem is the system, not them. It’s a game of musical chairs and the people in the good chairs never stand up.

This isn’t, again, sufficient by itself for political change, but it is one of the necessary first steps: people must understand that without political change their lives aren’t going to get better and will probably get worse.

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Texas Lessons For Preparing For The Ongoing Collapse

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On February 18, 2021

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The Texas disaster is a very dramatic example of what I’ve been urging people to prepare for.

When I was a kid I lived in a number of third world nations: Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and visited a bunch more.

In a failing state, stuff just doesn’t work well, and when there is a shove, it collapses. You can count on infrastructure or the state when things go bad.

Most of the time it’s less dramatic than the Texas disaster, BUT when you have a fragile state and infrastructure, every disaster turns into a catastrophe. Texas is the worst first world infrastructure collapse we’ve seen, but California in recent years has embarassed itself.

In fragile ecosystems, as well, events burn out of control quickly, as with the Australian, Brazilian, Californian, and various other wildfires.

Further, “once in a hundred year” weather events are becoming common. This was predicted by Stirling Newberry back in the 90s to me (he couldn’t get it published) and it’s now understood by scientists to be the case.

So if you have a neoliberal austerity state which has spent 40 years de-regulating and privatizing public infrastructure and downsizing the public service into incapability, you wind up with a situation where you can’t count on the State for water, food, or power during emergencies.

That means you have to prepare for yourself. Some off-grid energy, some food and medicine and water stores or ability to get those even in a collapse.

Collapses are sometimes brief: Texas will be back to normal soon enough, though the water damage caused by bursting pipes will lead to a lot of folks winding up homeless.

But they will become more frequent and even when there isn’t a crisis America and various other nations will move to a situation where rolling brown-outs and black-outs are common; where you can’t trust the water (already true in large parts of America) and where healthcare is more and more rationed. (One scandal in the UK is how people with learning disabilities are not being ressusitated from Covid: that sort of “triage” will continue and become wider.)

There are a lot of different decline scenarios. For many people “chronic with irregular but frequent mini-crises” is a good one to expect. The state won’t go away entirely; the cities will not collapse 98% and empty into the country a.la. the Dark Ages, but life will get shittier and more uncertain the social supports that were common and routine; the competence expected from the Great Society and which lived on because the Great Engineers of the 30s-70s did good work, will go away.

In such a situation you need to be able to handle bumps. If power goes out for a few hours or days or even two or three weeks, you need to handle it. If food is disrupted, you need to handle it. (Hardest is water.)

That’s just how it’s going to be.

These solutions don’t have to be individual or family based, they can be communal outside the State, but if you don’t have them, it takes little to destroy your life. If you’ve got the money, something like this off the grid house in the inner city is a good idea, if you don’t you should still make preparations.

Remember, these sort of events will become chronic, and in time lesser versions will just become part of everyday life. I expect, assuming I live a normal lifespan (and I’m not young any more) to see in the first world the sort of brown-outs and blackouts that were common in the third world when I was young: but exacerbated by climate and social collapse.

Get ready now, while you still can. Leave it too late, and it will be, well, too late.

Worst case scenario, if by some miracle our society pulls itself together, you’ve spent money on some preparedness you don’t use and have a home with higher resale value.

And remember, don’t build your wonderful home on a Florida flood plain; a place where the aquifers will all dry up in 20 years or the equivalent.

Be well.

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Rush Limbaugh Escapes The Hell-World He Created

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On February 17, 2021

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Stirling Newberry explained the concept of a death bet: you bet that the negative consequences of your actions will occur after you are dead. Classically this explains climate change: decision makers who could have stopped it will almost all be dead before it becomes significant.

Rush Limbaugh was one of the most important people in creating the modern right; driving deregulation and spreading hate and racism. It’s impossible to overstate how influential he was in the 90s, not just thru his own radio show, but because other radio hosts copied him. Radio was a BIG deal back then still, and had massive reach.

There aren’t ten people more responsible for America being what it is today than Limbaugh; there may not be five. (Robert Ailes, who ran Fox, is on the list too.)

All of these people died before they suffered from making the US a non-fuctional undeveloping nation. They were protected by their wealth and their power. Limbaugh died rich. Ailes died rich.

Meanwhile, in Texas, utilities deregulation and privatization has lead to vast suffering and death, which, yes, anyone with sense who wasn’t blinded by greed or the world’s stupidest ideology (if we give a lot of money to rich people that’ll be good for us!) knew would happen eventually.

America is divided into two tribes who hate each other. Eliminationist rhetoric is common. The media fans the flames, regularly lying and dividing people against each other.

Limbaugh. His legacy. What he worked hard for all his life. What made him rich. Hate, stupidity and the destruction of his country.

Limbaugh won. He’s dead, he never suffered the consequences of his belief.

But many of you, dear readers, will.

Men like Limbaugh at the enemies of all good people; all decent people. So are those who funded him and pushed him. So is every Texas utility executive; every member of the board, and every single politician who pushed deregulation, privatization and policies which increased climate change.

They sold your future; your lives; your children’s lives, so they could live well and be rich. This includes Pelosi and Biden, both of whom were very important in creating this world.

They’re going to die, never having faced the consequences of the evil they have done. You, on the other hand, if you’re not old and cushioned by wealth, will.

A functioning society would throw all these people in jail and take all their money and power. America? Canada? Britain?

We re-elect them and make sure they get richer and richer.

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Plus c’est la même chose

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On December 31, 2020

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***MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST****

Jeremiads notwithstanding, it appears that Biden’s strategy of appealing to Trump-disgusted suburban voters worked. At the US presidential level, at least, left-populists and Sanders supporters proved to be essentially irrelevant, politically. The Democratic consultant class has had its biases confirmed. What is, haha, left to the left-wing populist is to double down on the jeremiads: to predict that in the future, the inevitable failure of now-successful beige neoliberal centrism to reinstate its heavenly mandate in the USA will result, down the road, in the election of a smart fascist/right-populist Man On Horseback, if we’re lucky, merely a Viktor Orbán figure or suchlike for the American context — or worse, possibly much worse.

This reasoning seems very plausible to me. Because it is true that unless the neoliberal establishment has a change of heart, Bidenist/Obamaist US leadership will not be able to turn the ship around from an on-going trajectory of national and global decline. And insofar as that decline is felt in shrinking living standards, and insofar as “beige centrism” manages to suppress left-wing alternatives, the population will likely turn to forceful/violent right-wing populism, and all the inherent divide-and-conquer grifts that right-wing populism brings with it alongside the nationalist emotional highs and the “sugar rush.” As I said, it seems very plausible.

One of the bad habits of neoliberal intellectualism is an excessive reliance on “counter-intuitive” explanations as exemplified by the once-popular book Freakonomics.   We should be rightly suspicious of narratives that tell us that things we view in common-sense terms as bad are actually good. Sometimes counter-intuitive explanations like that are valid, but only sometimes. But we should not fall into the reverse trap and always uncritically accept simpler explanations that happen to match our moral intuitions. A common left-wing moral intuition is what I explained above: A people increasingly deprived of access to the good life and unable to access progressive responses to that deprivation will eventually provide reactionary forces a breakthrough. It has, after all, happened before.

It is the implied determinism that we should view with at least a little bit of suspicion. First of all, although we should heed history’s warning signs, history actually does not truly repeat reliably, and context matters. Trump’s senility and incompetence was, in point of fact, part of the Trump political brand. It was the riposte to a failing elite in a time when elite “competence-signalling” was part of the elite self-image. The specific trajectory to the “competent Trump” is much harder to fathom, when the incompetence was specifically a part of what he was and still is lionized for by his most ardent followers.

If we leave aside the typical and easy materialist determinism that thrives particularly on the more left end of the spectrum and accept a little bit of “counter-intuitive” reasoning, a different picture emerges. One in which the success and failure of Trump was highly dependent on circumstances over and above material discontent, circumstances that are difficult to line up again.  Circumstances in which the very competence of the future feared competent fascistoid is one of the features that prevents his (or her) rise, just to give a possibility. One in which the bad memory of Trump is sufficiently mobilizing for a long enough period of time that the mainstream neoliberal centre is protected from attempts at overcoming it.

In that world, between every election, things just keep getting worse and worse. And yet, the process of coalition building in a complex society given the American political system simply throws up Biden after Biden, Democrat or Republican. Decline centrism, unending. Like Tyler Durden’s vision in Fight Club, with people drying meat on the asphalt of a ruined highway, except they’re still arguing over whether they should choose the chieftain with the red trim or the blue trim as head chieftain, out of fear that one of them might reduce the incentives created by the fear of winter freezing by their proposed “peltfare” program.

Imagine this future: the soft, dirty sole of a comfortable white Reebok runner gently stroking a human cheek — forever.

Divided Societies in Decline Use Scapegoats to Re-Unify

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On November 24, 2020

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Chinese and American flags flying together.

A while back, Haydar Khan wrote an excellent article on American economic and technological decline, focusing on the diagnosis and differing solutions offered by economist James Galbraith and by Peter Thiel (the founder of Palantir, who made his initial fortune with PayPal and who is famous for his libertarianism, despite running a surveillance company).

The US is riven by divisions, split into two factions, who mutually hate, fear, and distrust each other. It has been in relative economic decline since the 70s, and this decline shows up in productivity statistics and in other ways like corruption and inequality. China is now, by some measures, the larger economy, and still growing faster than the US. While still somewhat behind technologically, in some areas, like 5G wireless, China is ahead.

So how does one fix this decline? We’ll skip Galbraith’s plan and move to Thiel’s.

Khan thinks that Thiel’s solution is more likely to work, because unlike Galbraith, Thiel has found scapegoats: The PC Left, parts of Silicon Valley (Google in particular), and China.

This is a standard policy. When a country is cracking up with internal divisions, it is common to find enemies to focus on. The German Nazis found socialists, Jews, and other “mongrel” races like Gypsies (whom everyone seems to forget), and the nations who had taken what they saw as German land, in particular France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

Obviously, any country that is “great” can’t “fail” and if it does, it must be because of “traitors and enemies.”

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The pivot against China began with Obama, ramped up with Trump, and despite some fears among China hawks, seems likely to continue under Biden. The PC left includes all the usual scapegoats, people who violate “purity” ethics: transsexuals, gays, blacks, and so on. The people the US and, indeed, many nations, love to beat down. Its core includes a LOT of Jews. These are groups many people live to hate and hurt.

As for Silicon Valley, it’s a neat trick for Thiel to pretend he doesn’t belong, but also it’s smart: He’s picking a part of Silicon Valley (his enemies) to be taken out, hoping to avoid the backlash himself. Silicon Valley isn’t loved, everyone believes that tech companies took and take away the good jobs, leaving people driving cars for Uber and doing odd jobs for Task Rabbit, and so on. There’s no dignity to these jobs, and definitely no money to speak of.

The political classes have bought in, big time, to the China part of this pivot, and there is a lot of hatred among both Democrats and Republicans of big tech, though more Facebook than Google. The PC left is a harder question; the liberal core of the Democratic party loves PC politics because they treat it as weaponized tokenism. It doesn’t matter how blacks are doing, what matters is that a black man was President. It doesn’t matter how women are doing, what matters is that a woman is going to be vice-President. Liberals want the glass ceiling shattered for minorities and women, not for the majority of minorities to have a good income and good health care, say. Plus, PC politics is easy weaponized against the Left: claim someone is racist, sexist, or anti-semitic (or is 30-years old and dares to date a 20-year old) and by the time it’s shown they aren’t, they’ve already lost.

Still, there’s a deep contempt in the liberal class whenever identity politics are taken truly seriously. Joe Biden may make noises about Black Lives Matter, but his plan is to give the police more money, after all. He doesn’t actually believe in it.

Thiel’s trying to package up all his personal hatreds and enemies into one bundle and get them chosen as the scapegoats. This may or may not work, but that’s what he’s doing. The problem is that, even if he doesn’t get everyone he wants in, the basic strategy is working. The US is moving towards a cold, and perhaps hot war with the rising superpower and the last superpower (China and Russia, respectively). At home, passions are hot and, at some point, some groups are going to be chosen as the “bad Americans.” The traitors. Some part of the elite (a small part) will be thrown to the dogs and so will many of the powerless.

This doesn’t happen in all great powers in decline, to be sure. But it’s a common play, and it has powerful people other than Thiel pushing it. They see US decline and its disunity, and they are looking for a way to turn the decline around or at least distract Americans from the actual authors of the decline (that would be people like Thiel) towards scapegoats.

Given how angry the American people are, this seems like a good odds bet. It’s not a sure thing, but it’s one of the high probability outcomes, especially with regards to China.

If you’re in one of these groups, or if you have ties to China or Russia or countries which will fall into the Chinese bloc, you should be keeping a very careful eye on how this develops. These are people who don’t blink at mass casualties to keep their power and wealth, and they won’t blink if you become a statistic.

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The European Union

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On September 21, 2020

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CONTENT WARNING: *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST ***

Both inside and outside Europe, the left is highly divided on the topic of the European Union, with a large current being firmly against it for reasons that are actually quite understandable, from multiple perspectives (not just economic). The recent history, especially the Syriza episode in Greece, does not help the reputation of the EU from a left-wing perspective, and there is a temptation to see anything that damages the EU as being good for the people of Europe.  Jeremy Corbyn’s somewhat incoherent position towards the EU can therefore be dismissed by some as the result of a circumstance impossible for him, whereby a good chunk of Labour voters were supportive of EU membership while a principled leftist like Corbyn would have to, in their inner selves at least, be against it.  The EU’s association with neoliberal economic policy has led some, including a large percentage of this blog’s own commentariat, to view Brexit as just another stick with which to beat the neoliberal dog, so to speak, and to take at best a neutral view of who and how the stick is wielded.

It is absolutely correct to say that EU institutions have developed in such a way as to embed neoliberal attitudes and policies deeply within them. The institutions of European integration were largely built at the very same time as the neoliberal consensus’ apparent accession to the Mandate of Heaven.  (Providence does not hand out these mandates on the basis of evident goodness or wisdom.)  Starting from the late 2000s, it became obvious that neoliberalism was losing the Mandate, and no clear claimant has as yet emerged, a worrying sign.

The dilemma for those who want a more just and sustainable human future is extent to which the active dismantlement of the EU is necessary or warranted.  There is a left-wing position that is a kind of short-term nihilism which celebrates the destruction of institutions as a necessary step in creating the opportunities for beneficial change.  This position should certainly be taken seriously and becomes increasingly relevant as neoliberal institutions continue to operate in “zombie” mode, deprived of the providential imprimatur.

The ideal case is that the dismantlement of the EU would lead to a condition that was more beneficial, i.e., replacement from the ground up with, if not with a single institution, then with a collection of polities that are better empowered to serve the needs of their citizens.  The prospects for this can only be understood in terms of the forces that created the European Union (and its predecessor organizations) in the first place.  Europe as viewed from a Martian height consists of extremely unstable, contentious nation-states with badly drawn borders (as it is impossible in Europe, the birthplace of the nation-state, to draw the borders well).  A handful of these nation-states took advantage of a specific set of historical circumstances to become great colonial-imperial powers, but partly due to their own internal contradictions and external developments eventually lost their own heavenly mandates.  Present-day Europe, ex-EU, is a checkerboard of small states and middling industrial powers which had to reinvent themselves in the latter half of the 20th century.

A cursory, common-sense examination of Europe’s present-day geographic situation indicates that the checkerboard (or chessboard) analogy is more than apt.  European countries sit on geographically strategic (if resource-poor, relatively speaking) real estate between the current hegemonic military powers and become easy prey for the very colonial tactics Europe itself perfected.  The post-WWII architects of European convergence, themselves functionaries of states skilled in colonial tactics, were absolutely correct to surmise that Europe required a super-state level of organization that was at least partly independent of other power blocs in order to prevent being further carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. The Middle East’s current, long-standing troubles illustrate clearly what can happen in that case.

The adolescence of European institutions during the neoliberal moment presents the central dilemma, because it itself is now a major threat to a protective European unity.  The question is: what is the optimal and most feasible way to lever out zombie neoliberalism without putting European countries at risk of “integration” into the pathologies already evident in the current hegemons?  The question is not an abstract one: one of Brexit’s consequences is that the UK likely will adopt an even harsher internal economic stance with integration into the weaker, less consumer- and worker-friendly economic regulation of the USA.

My own position is that the only way to resolve the deadlock is by the boring, difficult work of building cross-border, cross-polity popular solidarity both inside and outside the current EU.  It is the only way to enshrine the benefits of European integration with the necessary reform of the EU’s economic management.  Anything else — and admittedly, “anything else” is the most likely prospect — risks that those who live in Europe jump from the frying pan into the fire, following a mirage of dead-end cultural-nationalist idylls and emotional appeals to a clean, safe world that never really existed.

Square circles

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On September 15, 2020

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*** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST *** MANDOS POST ***

I just want to draw some attention to this post on Naked Capitalism that I thought was an excellent analysis of the dilemma of left-wing electoral politics.

They have done so mainly by convincing a layer of affluent, middle-aged professionals that the Left ultimately represents a threat to their most cherished social values: meritocratic, individualistic, cosmopolitan liberalism. In the US, this perceived threat has mainly taken the form of a repeated insistence (against absolutely all psephological evidence) that a Sanders candidacy would inevitably lose to Trump, thereby extending the life of his cartoonishly villainous regime. This same threat was used to convince older Black Democratic voters in the South that the defence of centrist liberalism was the only alternative to a perpetuation of Trumpian white supremacism. In the UK, the same effect was achieved by convincing a small but strategically crucial section of middle-class voters that Jeremy Corbyn was an advocate for Brexit and an antisemite, and that voters should instead lend support to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens (or abstain).

Secondly, again in each case, a nationalist, and increasingly irrationalist, populism on the Right has attracted enough support from some of the social constituencies who we might have hoped would unite around a radical social democratic agenda to make it impossible for that programme to win a majority. In the UK this was the constituency which voted for Johnson to ‘get Brexit done’. In the US, Trump’s economic nationalism and nativist populism mobilised lots of his base.

His failure to deliver on any of his promises (either to build a wall on the Mexican border or to bring jobs back to the rust belt) has undermined much of his credibility with that section, which is partly why increasingly deranged conspiracy theories are circulating among his die-hard supporters. There isn’t much reason left to vote for Trump, if you didn’t benefit from his tax cuts, or don’t believe he’s engaged in a secret war with the ‘deep state’.

This is exactly right, but I would cast it in another way.  There is still a large segment of opinion on the left that wants to engage in electoral politics but without taking into account voter subjectivity.  Well, of the votes meaningfully available to the left (construed as generously as possible) in Western countries, they do not conceive of the universe in the way that many people, particularly on the economic and environmental left, want them to.  If you are interested in exerting power via electoral politics, you must seriously engage with the subjective reality that these voters live in.  In the USA, one large group views Trump and all his supporters to be a critical values threat (what I’ve been calling the “dire aesthetic emergency” — keep in mind that I do not use “aesthetic” in a derogatory and trivializing way), another group (black voters) exist in a state of justified mistrust towards the rest of the electorate, and another group wants economic improvement but only if it is obtained through an aggressive posture towards those they view as an outgroup.  How these groups formed is a matter of a complex social history that is not fully amenable to class politics via “vulgar Marxism”.

Perhaps because it is, ultimately, the expression of inchoate and malleable emotional forces, nationalism can become attached to various political projects and tendencies. Its most extreme manifestation may have been in the murderous modernity of mid-twentieth century fascism, but the New Right of Thatcher and Reagan also managed to convince xenophobes and nationalists that they were on their side, willing to endorse racist and militarist projects as long as they also got to sell off public utilities and slash taxes for the rich. So the discourse of nationalist authoritarianism has proven remarkably flexible over the years, being used to justify everything from imperialist war to the destruction of the British coal industry. But the purpose that conservative nationalism always serves is to provide alternative explanations for historical events to those that would inform a progressive response: blaming unemployment on immigration; blaming union unrest on unpatriotic militant workers; blaming crime on the supposed moral degeneracy of ethnic minorities.

In the UK, the most recent and powerful iteration of this narrative was the Right-wing argument for Brexit. The Brexit story offers a compelling and plausible account of almost all of the cultural, social, political and economic changes of recent decades that many UK citizens have cause to regret, while promising an easy remedy to them. The weakening of our democratic institutions, the collapse of manufacturing industry and the consequent loss of secure employment in many places, the changing cultural composition of our cities and other communities: all could be laid at the door of EU membership. Of course a few of the people who voted Leave did so out of a hard-headed Left-wing understanding of the EU as an institution committed to the implementation of neoliberalism. Of course almost everyone who took such a view was a committed supporter of lifelong anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn. But absolutely every relevant survey suggests that the proportion of leavers who were motivated by this view, free from any nationalist fantasies of ‘recovering sovereignty’ or restoring cultural purity, was statistically negligible. A certain section of the American Left loves the idea that Brexit was in fact a vote against neoliberal policy rather than the reactionary form taken by dismay at some of its effect. The truth is, for most of its supporters and opponents, a vote for or against Brexit was the precise symbolic equivalent of a vote for or against Trump’s border wall.

There is a strong temptation, again especially among economic leftists, to see favorite leftist bugbears (e.g., the construction of European institutions while neoliberalism still seemed to bear the Mandate of Heaven) as the “real” thing that underlies the false consciousness of nationalist resentment.  Arguing this requires the kind of psychologizing that typically heralds weak armchair sociological reasoning.  Perhaps if one were already in power, one could use economic policy or withdrawal from neoliberal globalization to abate the underlying impulses that motivate proto-fascist ideation in the population.  This is putting the cart before the horse.  There is no evidence that catering to those impulses before attaining power enables you to create a cadre of voters that is more motivated by economic policy than by latent cultural resentments.

There are therefore two overall options:

  1. Accept the electorate as it is (yes, fully understanding the power of capitalist media to shape public opinion without overestimating it or imputing omnipotence to it). Then make a decision as to what are the palatable compromises in order to exert power.
  2. Set aside electoral politics as the center of available political progress and do the hard work, outside the question of elections, of raising public consciousness and reshaping the attitudes of the electorate.

This is, of course, not a complete dichotomy, since a combination of the two is possible.  The option that has not been available at this present time, however, is running on a platform that centers economic and environmental improvement, given the constraints of the electoral system and its social history to date.  This is not a circle you can square.  The prospects for this have improved (the fact that Corbyn and Sanders got as far as they did is a relevant indicator), but the world is not “there” yet.

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