<nettime> Boomerang Blues / National-Popular

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

When times are tense, and there's nothing you can do about it, geeks and
intellectuals obviously scroll another webpage and read another book. I am
looking at one right now called "They're Not Listening: How the Elites
Created the National Populist Revolution." Available at your nearest
library (genesis). Certainly I don't endorse this conservative
dumpster-dive in recent history, but it's relatively well argued and the
preface makes an interesting read. Particularly at this moment when we are
shivering in our boots here in the USA and everyone in mainstream political
science is suddenly recognizing a national-popular shift that is global in
scope and has been underway for well over a decade.

When they say popular, they're actually talking about the inchoate,
aspirational expressiveness of people looking for a better pathway - not so
far from movements for redistribution and social justice that you may have
been involved in. When they say national they are talking about a full-on
revival of the most traditional and heavily institutionalized container for
packaging and functionalizing all that inchoate energy. Nationalism thrives
on the self-protective instinct. Although you wouldn't guess it from the
liberal press, one of the big griefs of the right wing in America, and
definitely in this book, is against the brutal wars that happen to be going
full-tilt right now. And yet the tariff war that the Orange Guy is talking
about is the surest imaginable recipe for expanded global conflict, so I
don't endorse that either.

"Most crucially," these conservatives say, "critics of the national
populist movement should realize that their political uprising didn't need
to happen. It occurred because of the actions of the governing class, not
despite their efforts. The elite had countless opportunities over the last
three decades to signal to voters that they were listening to their
concerns, that the current system could work toward their best interests,
and that the global liberal agenda was worth protecting. "

This is what many of us warned about during the alter-globalization
movement: that the sudden, uber-confident restructuring of everything down
to daily life and dreams would provoke a violent resentment against the
elites, for their arrogance in unilaterally deciding the fate of everyone.
9/11 immediately proved it from the outside. Now both the arrogance and the
resentment are on full display at the heart of empire. It's Polanyi's
double movement, where the conservative backlash against the global market
order becomes much worse than the real pathology it seeks to cure.

Yes, I know that billionaire cabals pilot these shifts, I do follow that,
but they are riding a tiger with its own intentions. The point is that the
neoliberal free trade corporate networks paradigm has brought its opposite
into being, nationalism as an ethos and a political project, with blinders
and oppression baked in. Was this in the air 30 years ago?

Actually my first text on nettime, called TNCS, pointed to the kind of
right-wing populist resentment that neoliberal oligarchy was likely to
provoke, because you could already see it at the time. Frankly, that text
wasn't popular in the emergent anti-globo circles and I couldn't push that
kind of critique out into the inchoate aspirations of the day, although I
always referred back to Polanyi's double movement. Now it's no theory
anymore, simply actuality. We have it full in the face.

For an unvarnished Marxist take on national populism, check out Jamie
Merchant's brilliant book, "Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global
Decline." I did read this one cover to cover. He shows you how the
well-known pendulum between bourgeois liberalism and national-popular
authoritarianism has swung in the past, and then he follows that process
into the global social relations of capital right now, at the crisis
moment. Particularly convincing is the analysis of generalized slow-growth
as the motor of resentment in a system that banks only on expansion. Plus
he's a Chicago guy who knows the street. Maybe you have to like this sort
of literature, but if you do it's a  grand-scale, precise and sobering take
on the exact same thing the conservatives are talking about. The shit
that's going down right now I mean. Cross your fingers because we could see
a sudden implosion of liberalism, followed by a lot of dark unknown.

solidarity, Brian
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