Re: <nettime> Fascist "trolls" and back on track

I usually and prefer to lurk but since we’re talking about Generation Queer, I want to weigh in as a queer 26 year old :) Here’s the longest thing I’ve ever written on nettime.

I thought Dan’s words about morality and politics were great, as well as Angela’s analysis of how Protestantism continues to influence American politics. Thanks for that—it woke some things up in me.

The appeal for political agency through the language of morality is as old as America itself. The first black and indigenous people able to claim some sort of political and social status in this country did so through the church. Same with (white and middle class) women’s rights, with the abolition of alcohol and anti sex work. By subverting the logic of evangelizing, those who were willing to assume the position of being preached to were able to justify their need of political power by doing “God’s work.” The tightest knit Christian groups today are still ethnic churches.

In my experience of activist spaces, the freedom presented is an ideal that reminds me of biblical language. There’s the idea that the freedom we are seeking is one where all types of oppression is absolished, where no group can oppress others, and that oppression is of the world and worldly thing (capitalism). This freedom or solidarity can only be worked towards but not obtained. The work we do towards this freedom is fellowship. A lot of people I met in these spaces have backgrounds in the church.

Issues of morality have contributed to minefield politics but I’ve seen far less of that in the past year. It’s considered “last year” to tell someone to check their privilege. The Protestant answer to morality is just so complicated, with predestination and sacrifice overruling the original sin as well as the commandments. Part of why Christianity has been powerful is because it has such beautiful answers to oppression (give onto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s, for example, which shows that the power of money can never be owned but only issued).

I just wanted to mention that, because it seems to me that making ones point (on social, political, and economic oppression) in Christianity is a little like making one’s point in English. Ultimately, it’s the oppressor’s language that works very well in the oppressor’s institutions. It seems that people my age are using such language because we are navigating the question Civil Rights never answered—that of integration or separation, of whether we can build more political power by integrating with the nation and its institutions, and of whether we are even able to accept our already anti-nationalistic identities (foreign, property, instigator) and build forms of separate power.

IMO, morality and English are still being used today because that question has been closed and not answered. Christianity and English are tools (of the master) that exist on the hyphen of Americans who are always becoming American but never allowed to arrive. Hyphenated Americans do the work of building America as a project, of freedom and protest as soft power. I myself am an assimilated Asian American who tries to work towards social change (which lets me be a little bad but mostly work very hard), exactly as expected of a model minority. Revolution will not come from us in the western nations who perform professionalized protestor roles, who work in academics or non profits. It will come from the subaltern.

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 9, 2018, at 8:11 PM, Angela Mitropoulos <[email protected]> wrote:

On Fri, 9 Nov 2018 at 11:30, Dan S. Wang <[email protected]> wrote:
The reduction of politics to a question of good and bad people deeply
afflicts radical political subcultures in the US,

Dan,

I find it difficult to reconcile your historiography of US activism and politics with what I know about both US history and theoretical paradigms more generally. I'm also a bit confused by the definition of "identity politics" as a paradigm of good and bad people.

I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the treatment of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been conducted through more or less tacit assumptions about identity that link to entitlement. And your disappearance of white men's identity politics as a tacit default or "universal" has the effect of yielding a narrative that says (incorrectly in my view) that "identity politics" only began when the former's claim of universality was challenged. I don't see how this could be described as depoliticisiing so much as the very opposite: heightened conflict, including over the use of resources, and labour (which presumably also includes things like enormous pay disparaties, sexual harassment which involves employers and coworkers treating other workers' bodies as their unlimited property, and so on).

As to the separate issue of the way this heightened conflict is handled, I think there are better explanations than Millennials are doing it wrong.

There is a longstanding approach that treats fascism as if it were a variety of sin (the Catholic philosopher Girard, for instance). I could not disagree more with that understanding of fascism, or politics more generally. But with regard to the US, the growing influence of evangelicals and religious conservatism more generally has tended to displace a concept of people doing awful things that people can change with a concept of good and evil. This is hardly down to Millennials. At the same time, evangelicals and conservative Catholics have adopted a pretty selective, exculpatory response to awful things that powerful people (powerful white men) do, which suspends judgement because only God can posthumously judge what is in someone's heart etc. It's obviously highly selective, given the growth of mass incarceration, extra-legal and legitimated violence, that has been directed, in the main, against black people, people of colour (think border violence), and women.

Add to this the way in which a younger generation have been thrown to the wolves as a consequence of increasingly precarious conditions of work and highly restrictive conditions on welfare, I am not surprised that part of the pushback involves an insistence on the powerful being held to account for their actions. In this world. I disagree, strongly with moral economic theories (Catholics like Polanyi and Mouffe peddle this mysticism far more than any Millennial). But I can't bring myself to fault young people for insisting on accountability and change.

best,
Angela

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