Re: <nettime> Ocular facts

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 7/15/24 15:45, David Garcia via nettime-l wrote:
> Why do centrists Fail? Because centrists are usually 'technocrats' who 
> see politics as a process of piece meal problem solving based on focus 
> groups. They often have poor story telling skills. The very word 
> ‘progressive’ invests hope in the future whereas the right is more 
> inclined to deploy nostalgia. Take BACK control or Make America great 
> AGAIN.


I think the lack of story telling skills is more a symptom than a cause. 
It, quite accurately, reflects the fact that the center has no story to 
tell anymore, ever since the "peace dividend" and the belief in 
"public-private partnerships" ended with Clinton/Blair/Schröder.
Since then, the contradictions have mounted. (Obama is different because 
me could tell a  different story that sidestepped some of these 
contradictions, but he could not resolve them in any way.)

Sociologically speaking, society needs to achieve three types of 
integration to function. It needs system-integration, that is, its 
various parts need to be form a coherent whole. Say, the educational 
sector must provide people with relevant skills. In the West, this 
system is capitalism, which obviously is much more comprehensive than 
the economy in a narrow sense.

Second, it needs social-integration, that is people must subscribe, to 
some degree, to basic values and rules of how society is organized. A 
voluntary submission to what Gramsci might have called "hegemonic 
ideas". They don't need to be realized fully in practice, but they 
provide orientation. In the West, these values and rules have been 
largely liberal democratic, with a notion of universal human rights, the 
rule of law and some degree of social safety as the background to a life 
of personal freedom and dreams (life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness).

Third, it's ecological-integration, a society's capacity to have access 
to the material goods necessary for (re)production. For the longest 
time, this meant access to land and resources (Lebensraum, as the Nazis 
called it), but under climate change this takes on a different quality.

The centrist project has been to create a "win-win" situation for 
various factions of society, achieving both system- and 
social-integration, at the expense of ecological integration. In the 
process, society massively overshot the ecological boundaries of the 
planet, and the price of this is increasingly threatening its capacity 
to achieve integration in the other two fields.

Centrist politics knows all of this, but vetted to capitalism and 
liberal democracy, it continues to play the old game, with some changes 
at the edges (austerity and solar power).

The hard-right, particularly in the US, doesn't play this game anymore. 
The Reagan is truly dead. Of course, they are also not willing to give 
up on capitalism, but are ready to ditch liberal democracy. Not the 
formal part of voting and parliaments, but things like the rule of law 
(e.g. extension of presidential immunity) and most importantly, any 
notion of universalism.

With that, they plan to continue to exploit cheap nature, while 
promising to shield core-constituencies from its effects, even when the 
rest of the planet burns and/or drowns. And how do they do this? By 
building walls and deporting people ("remigration", as the neo-Nazis in 
Europe like to call it). Over time, one can imagine, the 
core-constituency will be getting smaller and smaller, to the point 
where they all fit onto rockets to Mars. There are plenty of 
"visionaries" planning for that.

What Trump, particularly in the current campaign, is managing is to 
build a coalition around this vision. As far as I can see, it consists 
of four major blocks:

1) The fossil industries (oil, gas, coal), who have a lot to lose from a 
different ecological-integration. They know their time is up, but are 
unwilling to fade into the sunset, there is too much money to be made 
(Think Koch brothers or Joe Manchin in the US, or the German FDP's role 
in pushing "e-fuels" in Europe).

2) The technology industry who hates regulation in the areas of crypto 
and AI, but also, in the US, ideas round taxing unrealized capital 
gains, which hits venture capital. They really like the speculative 
economy, where they can make shit up while making sure that others will 
hold the bag.

3) Small-town elite. Members of the local chambers of commerce, who hate 
not just taxes, but also globalization, and religious conservatives who 
reject secular modernism.

4) Disenfranchised lower-middle classes, who have seen their income 
stagnate or fall over the last decades, accelerated by austerity and an 
unjust transition (think Macron's plan to increase fuel taxes which 
ignited the "yellow vests" movement). To them, the promise of liberal 
democracy sounds hollow and universalism sounds like "affirmative 
action" for others.

I think, like all political coalitions, the resulting politics are 
contradictory and need to be so, given the contradictory nature of the 
base. [1]. This makes it unstable. The Uber-venture capitalist Marc 
Andreessen, for example, is well-known to despise small-town America. In 
his view, anyone who failed to move to Silicon Valley (and other 
islands) deserves all the misfortune they are getting. Worker populism 
and tax-cut for the rich doesn't go well together. Etc, etc.

But for now, it's a coalition, and it has a story to tell: Fuck the 
others, we are going to eat the entire steak alone!

This project has broad support, but it's not a popular majority (as 
could be seen most recently in France), so disenfranchising voters, 
gerrymandering, demobilizing our opponent supporters so that the 
minority can win, is a bit part of the strategy.

Compare that to Scholz, Starmer, and even Biden. What's their story? I'm 
not as incompetent as the others, but they turn out to be as incompetent 
because they are unwilling to address their own contradictions.

Felix


[1] An excellent analysis of the contradiction in project 2025

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/






























--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org