See my piece in The Asian Age (and Deccan Chronicle).
http://www.asianage.com/opinion/oped/071216/in-us-jewish-muslim-solidarity.html
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Note: My rumination on whiteness and the emergence of a post-white world is not an attack on specific people, nor on “white people” in general. Nor is it intended to reify color as denoting essential characteristics; rather, I am using “whiteness” and “non-whiteness” to denote a mix of cultural, political and economic positions that are loosely aligned with skin color and color identifications. Starting around the 16th century, economic-technological and geo-political shifts were accompanied by cultural and epistemological shifts that both fed the political and economic power of European (and then US settler white) nations and drew funding and legitimacy from that power. It should go without saying that “whiteness” is not intrinsically bad, but not only does “power corrupt,”* but the standard set by hegemonic elites prioritizes both the epistemological frameworks AND the security of those identify as and with those elites.
Today, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as symptomatic events, we are seeing, in slow motion, an epochal, epistemological shift from whiteness as the standard of power and cognition to… well, we don’t know yet. This is a long process that started a few centuries ago as a resistance to colonialism which was the outward face of the setting in of whiteness as the ground from which knowledge is generated and assessed, as well as the ground from which power, in increasingly global terms, is asserted both beneficently and exploitatively. Globalism and globalization started with colonialism. Technological advances allowed for great increases in international trade and cultural exchanges, as well as more travel and migration. Resistance to the oppressive and patronizing aspects of colonial rule grew. And over the last five decades the decolonized increasingly claimed authority by owning and adapting the discourses and technologies of modernity. Globalism and globalization ballooned, with both white and non-white winners and losers. Interestingly but not surprisingly, the non-white winners were mostly aligned with what I am loosely summarizing as “white epistemology,” which has led to some symmetry between the nativism of non-white losers in majority non-white countries and the nativism of white losers in still-majority-white-but-likely-to-change countries. The process, indeed progress, of white nativism was heralded by Martin Heidegger, among others. Reading through the late October 2016 issue of the London Review of Books (LRB), I found Heidegger quoted in Malcolm Bull’s intensely pertinent review of his Black Notebooks:** "Our historical Dasein experiences with increasing distress and clarity that its future is equivalent to the naked either/or of saving Europe or its destruction. The possibility of saving, however, demands something double: (1) the protection of the European Vőlker from the Asiatic; (2) the overcoming of their own uprootedness and splintering." (from Heidegger’s 1936 ‘Europe and German Philosophy’) What Bull’s review does is link this early harking of the white (European/US) angst we are seeing in full flower almost a hundred years later to both a fascinating perspective on the necessary transformation of contemporary democracy proposed by the Russian political theorist, and Trump supporter, Alexander Dugin, and a pragmatic view of location-based rentiers (who accrue financial benefits simply by being citizens of economically and politically dominant countries) as proposed in Branko Milanovic’s analysis of inequality at the global scale. Bull tells us that Dugin draws on Heidegger to develop a “Fourth Political Theory” to replace the failed politics of liberalism, Marxism, and fascism, and explains: “Dugin takes Heidegger’s claim that the consummation of the essence of power can be seen in ‘planetarism’ as a reference to contemporary globalization – a moment when, as Heidegger prophetically described it, ‘the furthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically.’ In this context, the Fourth Political Theory offers the only viable alternative for all those who, like the Russians, ‘suffer their integration into global society as a loss of their own identity.’” In Bull’s recounting of the Heideggerian trajectory which Dugin adopts, “the plight of the abandonment of being” is the necessary condition for another beginning, a greatness that “can only be realized by ‘a seizing of, and persevering in the innermost and outermost mission of what is German [MC note – or “German” is generalizable to nativist for a particular national context].” Bull’s review gets really interesting and pertinent when he moves on from relatively familiar Heideggerian territory to Branko Milanovic’s work on inequality, twisting it cleverly into the trope of birth(erism) and thence into a plausible synthesis, “For anyone living in the West who is not in the highest 1 percent of global income, there is an economic incentive to think in Heideggerian terms: to stand firm on native soil and claim citizenship rent.” Bull’s path to this synthesis bears quoting here: “…As the economist Branko Milanovic has shown, the best predictor of your income is not your race or class but your birthplace…. …what Milanovic calls ‘citizenship rent’ (the increased income you get from doing the same job in one country rather than another)…. This helps explain why citizenship has suddenly gained more salience than class [MC note: not sure I agree with this]…. In a world where geographical location is the best predictor of economic outcomes, being indigenous counts for a lot, and the natural born citizen clause attached to the presidency of the US provides a model. If the presidency is not open to immigrants, why should other jobs be? Of course, the new nativism feeds off ingrained forms of racial prejudice. But it is conceptually distinct, not least because in terms of global income distribution race is (as would-be migrants are well aware) far less predictive than location. You don’t have to be racist to be a xenophobe, for as Levinas commented in an essay on Heidegger, ‘attachment to place’ is itself a ‘splitting of humanity into natives and strangers.’” While Bull’s review takes us through a joining of the Heideggerian narrative of plight to greatness with the pragmatics of a contemporary political economy of citizenship rents, along the way introducing us to the logic of a ‘Fourth Political Theory,’ two other reviews in the same issue of LRB bring whiteness back into the frame. One provides a view of the white US (masculine) left’s nostalgia for self-fashioning by the (Walden) pond, and the other is an explicit critique of white “racial paternalism” and insidious “evolutionism” in the field of international relations as it developed in the 20th century. Stefan Collini’s review of Mark Greif’s Against Everything: On Dishonest Times surprised me by seeming completely out of touch with discursive struggles today. It is a kind and bland review that left me wondering if that reflected more about Collini or about Greif. I am mentioning the review here only because its most striking image is of a man, most decidedly a man, who must “have the nerve to look steadily [at an object of discussion] and think.” The figure of Greif emerges, according to and reflected by Collini, as an American (decidedly white) man who thinks and learns slowly by the side of a beautiful pond. Collini expresses a polite impatience at the end of his review – “but somehow this existential quest has to be made to connect up with collective modes of responding to a world in which global capital threatens to pollute the waters of the pond, build condos around its edge, and prevent access for all but the very rich.” I read this penultimate sentence of the review as residual impatience with an aging, declining trope. Susan Pedersen reviews Robert Vitalis’ White World Order, Black Power Politics, which is a critical history of the field of international relations in the United States. Bluntly, she says, “and Vitalis is blunter,… international relations was supposed to figure out how to preserve white supremacy in a multiracial and increasingly interdependent world.” The history, as told, ends with a kind of “forgetting.” Pedersen tells us: "Mainstream scholars didn’t so much change their minds about race and empire as walk away from the question. Part of this shift was generational, as ambitious younger scholars turned towards bipolar rivalry as the hot new subject of research…. The horrific racial persecution of the Nazi regime had an impact too, delegitimizing explicit racial argument within the academy…. The 1960s would bring ‘race’ back to the academy – but mostly through new African-American studies programs, not political science or international relations…. [Vitalis] wants his discipline [MC note: as does Pedersen, it seems] to understand not only how central the category of race and the structures of racism were to its founding institutions and paradigms but also to see the erasure of that history not as progress but as repression, a wilful forgetting that has if anything made it less equipped to comprehend (much less to address) the shocking racial inequities that still mark both the American and the global order." Pedersen’s review of Vitalis’ book focuses on a familiar narrative of white supremacy and racial inequities. Reading it in the narrow context of Bull’s review of Heidegger’s notebooks and Collini’s review of Greif’s thinking man, and in the broader context of Brexit and Trump’s campaign and win, I see it as more evidence of a writhing, but still long, tail-end of a flipping system, in which “whiteness” is still the face of the greatest concentrations of political, economic, and, yes, intellectual life, but is increasingly threatened by its own growing patches of flaccid entitlement and contradictions, as well as by the increasing authority of post-white voices (including voices from powerful non-white states, voices of superb non-white intellectuals, as well as voices from bodies that look white but are seeking an idiom that is different from the conventional idiom of standard whiteness). I am intrigued by the notion of a “Fourth Political Theory,” but I won’t look for it in the nativist imaginings of Heidegger and Dugin. I believe that, for the most part, the emerging epistemology will leave behind the heroic, self-inventing, white man, whether left or right, though there will always be a role for heroic self-invention in human narratives, whether inspirational or autobiographical. A post-white globalism will emerge over the decades of this century, perhaps over centuries, not without pain, and certainly not a Utopia. Many of the current inequalities of global capitalism will continue and new hierarchies and oppressions will emerge. Does this mean that we should stick with the current, known system? I don’t think we have a choice. The system is changing. And there are exciting new possibilities for equity and beauty. But there are also sobering, very sobering, trajectories towards planetary dysfunction and increasing disparity between technologically-fuelled wealth and the drudgery and deprivation of those who are late, or unable, to access the technological means of production of the 21st century. So while a post-white world is likely to emerge, we will still need to demand rights and equity for all, teach our children that a just system is possible, continue to be open to dialogue and community, continue to speak up when we see inequity and injustice, and, most vitally, continue to defend our planet. * … to quote, quite comfortably, Lord Acton who was a small actor in the solidification of the primacy of the “Western tradition” as the top epistemology in a universe of otherwise lesser epistemologies. ** Of course, it is entirely part of the process to be using hegemonic epistemology itself to understand and critique the consistencies, contradictions, progress, and eventually supersession of that epistemology! We will not be outside that epistemology until we are outside that epistemology. One of the things Hillary Clinton did not do, possibly because she remained a “well-brought-up” woman, was to confront her critics head-on and aggressively, “you’re full of shit.” I just noticed that, in suppressing my own anger, I am doing the same. Some of my anger is directed at Trump, his supporters, the Republican Party, etc. That’s easily expressed in the echo chambers in which I live AND it’s pretty pointless anger. They owe me nothing, they operate on the basis of different values and worldviews from mine. More than anger, I see dialogue, strategy, and political action as relevant to engagement with Trump, his supporters, and Republicans.
The anger that I am suppressing most, that is most difficult for me to utter, is directed at those on the center-to-progressive-left spectrum who comfort themselves that it’s Clinton’s fault and the Democratic Party’s fault. Yes, there are things her campaign could’ve done better and DEFINITELY the Democratic party needs some major overhauling, but once she was elected candidate (by a large number of voters, not by some sneaky number gamed by the DNC), SHE was the alternative to Donald Trump. Those who identify as left-of-center, as Democrats, or as appalled-by-Trump, if you did not support Clinton, you chose Trump. If you held your nose and groaned and moaned about Clinton, you chose Trump because you chose to let innuendo and relatively unimportant Clinton mistakes remain hugely amplified, while ignoring the fact that for the most part she was always left of center, was shifted further left by Bernie Sanders and his campaign, was genuinely open to input on issues of equity, civil rights, the environment, was likely to be open (and with greater authority and responsibility than as Secretary of State) to new ways of engaging with deeply challenging and complex foreign policy issues, and in general pretty intelligent, competent, consistent, and honest on policy/governance issues. Yes, I understand that you disagreed with her spouse’s centrism and its legacies, you disliked her connection to big money, you were suspicious of her hawkish foreign policy positions (not all of her positions were hawkish), you were underwhelmed by her (apparent lack of) charm, you found her white-woman feminism too old-fashioned and classist, many of you were upset that your candidate lost, and once the DNC emails were published you very understandably were angry about the DNC’s favoring Clinton (not nice, but not surprising given her history with the Democratic Party and his history as an independent). But you had a choice. Nurse your grievances (or, like Susan Sarandon, stoke The Real Revolution), OR defeat Trump. Trump did not get more votes than Republican candidates in the past. Clinton got fewer votes than Democratic candidates in the past. I’ve seen posts that simplistically blame Clinton—well, it’s her fault she wasn’t popular enough. My anger is because it isn’t only her fault. Bernie Sanders did his part, Elizabeth Warren did her part, Michael Moore did his part, Barack and Michelle Obama did their part, but if you didn’t support Clinton openly and fully, you helped Trump get elected. I’m closing my participation in this long, critical, often painful, (sometimes, just sometimes, touching or funny) election with a bow to Hillary Clinton, and some thoughts about going forward.
I honor her efforts, her perseverance, her ambition, her many strengths (intelligence and doggedness, to name two), her commitment to women and children, her pragmatism, her consistency AND her willingness to change. I honor her imperfection. This will be an election we and our children will remember for the rest of our lives. We will remember Bernie Sanders opening up the left for Clinton and hopefully leaving behind a movement, the DNC’s decision to back one of their own, her many (many!) plans, her email server and #thosedamnemails, Wikileaks and the Russians, her pantsuits, the Comey effect, “whitelash,” the urban “elites” disconnection with the white working class and rural America, the return of sexual language about and with women, Obamacare premiums going up, the rising power of the Latinx vote, appalling media coverage, the continuing distrust of Hillary Clinton, the shocking losses in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I hope I don’t remember Anthony Weiner. Donald Trump will be in my face for four years, so there’ll be layers of memories about him, escaping the leaden capsule in my mind I’ve tried to relegate them to. So now the election is over. If Clinton had won, there was a real chance of violence. I am both proud (and a little irritated) that Trump supporters can take for granted the kind of gracious concession Clinton offered, and nonviolence on the part of Clinton supporters and the left in general. So now the election is over minorities, especially Muslims, are under threat. Muslims are a small minority and there is, unfortunately, a very broad population of Americans who would be comfortable suspecting and restricting Muslims. Non-white Americans, the poor, the incarcerated, LGBTQ, and women are also likely to face threats to their rights, safety, and wellbeing. The environment is under threat. Trump has already indicated that he is committed to unravelling clean energy policies. Criminal justice and incarceration conditions are likely to get worse. In the stock market today, the private prison industry was a big winner. Healthcare will become less available AND more expensive. Big pharma will be restricted less, and so on. Now, what are we going to do? The midterm elections come up in two years. Meanwhile we need to focus on protecting the rights of minorities (I am particularly worried about the scapegoating of Muslims), LGBTQ, the incarcerated, women, and other groups that are likely to be vulnerable under Trump; on increasing equitable access to education, healthcare, healthy food, and housing; on protecting the environment. Let’s support local and state initiatives And work to turn the legislature in the midterm elections. Tim Kaine said (quoting Faulkner): “They killed us, but they ain’t whupped us yet.” YES! Clinton said: “Our campaign was never about one person or even one election.... Make sure your voices are heard.... There are more seasons to come.” YES! So, thank you Hillary Clinton! And now the work of citizenship in a democracy continues. Hillary Clinton FULL Concession Speech | Election 2016 Hillary Clinton formally and publicly conceded to Donald Trump this morning after an upset defeat in the presidential election. "Last night I congratulated… YOUTUBE.COM As a Bengali, I was aware that the second Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump fell on this year’s Maha Ashtami of Durga Puja. As a feminist Indian-American, who has lived almost twice as many years in the United States as my early life in India, I noticed the resonance of this coincidence with a pair of paradoxes that have intrigued me since 1980.
These are the paradoxes. The United States, which has a fabulous history of feminism and women’s movements, with flaws and conflicts, but fabulous nonetheless, has continued to be uncomfortable with female authority and leadership over the thirty-six years I have lived here. India which, despite its own tradition of astoundingly strong and varied women’s movements, has remained widely attached to patriarchy – with daily manifestations that range from the relatively benign passes given to sons and men to the horrors of frequent and casual violence against girls and women – has seemed to me more comfortable with female authority and leadership than mainstream U.S. culture. Starting twenty-six years ago, with occasional updating, my German spouse has said he has yet to meet a “submissive” Indian (especially Bengali!) woman. Indira Gandhi dominated most of my youth in India, but I have also seen and heard numerous other female leaders in India – politicians, businesswomen, educators, and especially fiery civil society women on the left. Today, when I am in India, I am struck by the easy ambition of educated young women, even in the midst of frequent social and professional sexism. In the United States, by contrast, I notice that, in a context where more women are graduating from college than men, highly accomplished and evidently ambitious women censor themselves and almost palpably reduce themselves; or if one does not, she is disliked in a special, generalized way, as much by other women as by men. She is not simply “an” obnoxious woman or “a" flawed leader, she is the expression of the flaws of female authority, which, the mainstream response seems to suggest, easily overflows the banks of natural female goodness. The Hillary Rodham of 1970s American feminism had to become Hillary Rodham Clinton to claim, and inevitably self-constrain, herself even while seeking greater authority. Over the years, with input from anthropology, literature, frequent arguments, and my personal experience, I’ve come to believe that the difference in comfort with female authority and leadership comes down mainly to three things: first, female leaders in very hierarchical (caste/class) societies benefit from belonging to a traditionally privileged category; secondly, where education is accessible only to a very small proportion of the population, educated women gain inordinate status and authority simply from education; and finally the symbolic imaging of women, usually religious, hugely constrains, or amplifies, how women’s power can be imagined. Here I am focusing on the last. As a Bengali, I grew up with Kali and Durga – manifestations of Shakti, power itself. The image of a woman, as woman, fully a woman, fighting for right was something I saw everyday in my mother’s puja room and celebrated every year at Durga Puja. Bengal, perhaps, has power associated with goddess more than any other part of India, but the idea of female Shakti is commonplace in Hinduism throughout the subcontinent, in some places further amplified by animist honoring of female power to generate and protect, in many places influencing the non-Hindu religions of fellow Indians. In the majority Christian U.S., on the other hand, there is no powerful female figure in Protestant iconography and the powerful Catholic figure of the Virgin Mary is above all modest and obedient, attributes that correlate well with the Protestant ideal of a good woman. Growing up in India, the Virgin Mary had been one more powerful female figure among many, not only because I learned about her powerful influence with her son from the nuns who taught me, but these nuns themselves, far from the male centers of Catholic power, both symbolic and real, and surrounded by a hospitable but uninterested majority of non-Christians, were erudite and independent. In the way one absorbs assumptions without really thinking about them, I assumed that their erudition and independence was because they were powerful women of Christianity. Only after coming to the US did I grow to sense and learn that, in this majority Christian country, women are not associated with power. At their best, they are good. So this Maha Ashtami, as I waited to watch the debate, both outraged and wickedly amused by Trump’s “locker-room” hot mic, and as I rooted for the candidate who might be the first female President of the United States, I wondered again at these paradoxes, and the competition between powerful and good. In the end, the best leaders are both powerful and good. They, whether women or men, are usually not perfect with either attribute, but we who follow, or are governed, are doing well if they get most of it right. Early voting for the U.S. Presidential election has started, so if you are a U.S. citizen it’s time to choose.
The questions below should help you decide whether to vote, and whom to vote for. A. Whether or not to vote (beyond already existing self-motivation, and obvious right-and-duty reasons)… a. Is there any candidate, of the four running, who has a reasonable chance of winning, and who you think would be a terrible President? If you answer YES, then VOTE, and tell others to vote as well. B. Whom to vote for… For each question, and for each person, pick a score of 1-10, with 1 meaning least, and 10 meaning most.
ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 2. Who has been the most consistent policy-wise and “honest” in policy terms, in politically relevant roles that involve serving multiple constituencies with competing agendas? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 3. Who is likely to win? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 4. Who, once elected, is influence-able by you and people/legislators/politicians who hold your values/policy preferences? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson 5. Who, given her/his record, can be a canny and effective politician, working with legislators, bureaucrats, and foreign officials across a range of policy positions? i. Donald Trump ii. Hillary Clinton iii. Jill Stein iv. Gary Johnson Notice I don’t ask:
Time to choose, folks! Your choice should be the person who gets the highest total points. REGISTER AND VOTE! More than any other election I have experienced in the U.S., our current Presidential election is making me sick; I feel bloated with the nasty, unavoidable concoction of personality dissection, gossip, and partisan commentary I am fed everyday. I am not the only American who feels this way. We all play a role in the production and relentless distribution of this public pollution, but some of us have greater roles and greater opportunities for influence, and therefore greater responsibility for a political discourse, indeed a political culture, that is now a national disgrace. I hold as particularly responsible the two major parties (occasionally joined by the thin-voiced, childish mimicry of the Green Party and Libertarian candidates) and the media.
At lunch a few days ago, a friend tried to pinpoint when the shift happened from assessing Presidential candidates on the basis of what they stand for to what they are like, where what they are like is a shallow morass of un/successful image-creation, ability to sound like a living-room or bar buddy, common frailties, irrelevant transgressions of relatives and associates, shifting status on a prurient standard of sexual/gender correctness, and portentous judgment on private thoughts and communications that are increasingly publicized and read as the fundament of a “right to information” in democratic process. Attempts to present what candidates stand for in terms of potential policy and action, based on their past records and the substance of their current statements are covered over by either fear-mongering partisanship (…which the major parties now resort to with mind-numbing normality. If you read their emails to their supporters – a daily barrage – it appears that this is the basis of democratic politics in the US. And, yes, I fully intend the “equivalency" in my critique here.); or small-minded commentaries on character that may claim to have a moral basis, but end up sounding like the verbal sniping of a Hobbesian schoolyard. As a voter and a donor to campaigns, I have become increasingly frustrated by the way my party treats me like an ignorant partisan, and I have every reason to suppose that the other party does the same with its supporters.* I continue to believe that under the fluff of fear-mongering partisanship and personality-focused nonsense (both spiteful, usually about the opponent, and hagiographic, usually about one’s own candidate) that my party does hold the values that I hold about access to justice and wellbeing for all people in the country, and the role of government in creating conditions for such equality of access, but I find myself losing interest as the party and political campaigns seem simply to want to trigger me into sheep-like partisanship. I also would like to believe that the other party, under its own fluff of fear-mongering partisanship and personality-focused nonsense, holds values important to its supporters, including what they see as the role of government. I probably don’t share some number of their values and, for the most part, I disagree with their conclusions on the role of government and actual policies, but I’ve lost a sense of the substance of what the opposition stands for, given the irrelevancies they promote, presumably to trigger their supporters into simplistic partisanship. I would love to express my substantive disagreement in public argument and mobilize it in political contest, but, in our politically segregated lives, the space for public conversations across political differences is narrow and cross-partisan language is either politely flat, or poisonous. So I attribute significant responsibility to the major parties for the national disgrace of our politics and political discourse. But I hold the media, “the watchdog of democracy” (if this were a snapchat story, you would see and hear my snort), even more responsible than the major parties. As spouting “news,” indistinguishably from opinion and speculation, has become easier, news outlets compete to capture eyes and ears for their trivial, but often deliciously damaging, tidbits. As “right to information” becomes the right to uncover, publish, and comment on every private communication, regardless of its relevance to the substance of what a person, party, or platform stands for, the top news yesterday, for example, was about what Colin Powell said about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in private emails. I am interested in what Colin Powell would expect from a Republican candidate in terms of policy and governance and the ways in which Donald Trump falls short of his expectations; I am interested in what Powell would be concerned about with regard to Hillary Clinton’s leadership. I am not interested in his casual, abbreviated private judgments on either candidate. Pretty much everyday, I find articles that express, or defend against, snideness, spite, or gossip about the candidates, or even more irrelevantly, their families or associates. Sometimes these articles are routinely sensationalist, or colloquially written and unpretentiously pointless; other times they have a sober tone but belong to the same universe of amplified personality-, gossip-, and arena-style politics. Any critique (like this blog piece!) is ultimately sterile because by itself it does not recalibrate the functions and content of “news” and “media." And yet, I believe, the media with its new technologies, forms, and opportunities is the best equipped to shift our political culture back to substance, not just of personal character and capacity, not even just of the values that underly policies and the practical details of policies, but of the whole framework of values and policies of which a candidate is the face, as well as the legislative, knowledge, administrative, and civil society networks that necessarily undergird, drive, and contest those policies. Even while the internet and new social media have multiplied and amplified polarizing voices of innuendo and adulation, I have been astounded by the range and depth of information available to me with a network connection, and charmed by the way some people’s use of social media has shown me new ways to question and understand the world. Oddly, given my current cynicism and frustration, I am confident that journalists and commentators can craft a world of media that does the serious work of democratic public culture while keeping, if/as we must, the entertainment of free-wheeling burlesque and caricature. Will they? Will enough of them make an effort to draw us away from the untenable political culture we have today? * Communications strategists from both parties would do well to consider the framing, language, and tone of a recent letter by a long-time Republican Precinct Committeeman in Illinois, Chris Ladd. This blog post is inspired by Donald Trump’s April 2016 declamation: “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.” When this statement, with its combined affect of simple steadfastness and poetic heroism (a combination that is a common quality of folkish ethno-nationalist movements), resurfaced in the aftermath of last week’s Brexit vote, it drew my curiosity. I mentioned it to a couple of people and one said, “what is this word ‘globalism,’ when the correct word is globalization?” Despite considering these two words side by side for the first time in my life, I found myself fluently defending globalism’s integrity, and difference from globalization. Globalization, I said, captures the practical structures and processes of global movements, trade, communication, and so on. Globalism captures a culture, an ethos, an epistemological framework, a way of understanding the world, I said. The two words stayed with me because something about them seemed to be central to political disturbances in the United States and throughout Europe, with related-but-different expressions in other parts of the world.
I’ve heard globalization a lot more frequently, often hailed by politicians and business leaders as both the driver and result of economic growth and technological progress. With globalization, the world becomes a single marketplace of commodities, ideas, cultural aritifacts, and people. Governments manage globalization across national boundaries, building trans- and multinational infrastructures to streamline processes for inflows and outflows. But these are not globalism, and the apparently comprehensive marketplace of globalization is not the same as a community marketplace of symbolic exchanges, affective ties, and social contracts. The lived world of social contracts and affective ties is still shaped primarily by ethno-nationalist categories and the sentimental content of associated mythologies, certainly for my over-50 generation, and lags behind the structures of globalization. As a result ethno-nationalist rhetoric is still very potent in rallying disaffected people, and “globalist” rhetoric does not yet have discursive or affective depth on a wide scale. I looked up globalism (on Wikipedia, of course, as the lexicon of common knowledge, whether “correct” or not) and found that globalism has been used as a generic term for global ideologies (such as “justice globalism,” “market globalism,” “jihadist globalism,” etc.), but it seems not to have any full or textured content of its own. And yet, Trump’s “false song of globalism” evokes something coherent and complex, a world of symbols, images, ideas, and relationships that competes with (the songs of) ethno-nationalism. The benefits of globalization tend to accrue to well-off people; for them (including people like me) globalism, though largely unnamed, is developing mythological and affective depth. But for the majorities who relatively benefit much, much less (even when some sub-proportion benefits in absolute terms), globalization and its accompanying “false song of globalism” are elitist and exploitative. If globalism is to be a new framework for social contracts, symbolic meaning, and democratically legitimate politics, it needs a concerted and accelerated coagulation of new global language, mythology, structures, and actions that deliberately include the beauty and struggles of local and regional communities, not merely alternations between the pragmatics of globalization and the articulations – sometimes sublime, often shrill – of aging ethno-nationalisms. So all this mulling has led me to ask: What would it look like to have a politics of globalism? What could a new politics of globalism look like? Not globalization. Globalism. Not multilateralism. Perhaps not even a new kind of federalism. This I believe is the gauntlet that Brexit and Trump, as expressive moments, throw before our political imaginations. I don’t have an answer and I don’t think we’ll come up with an answer in the near future. Perhaps our descendants will see an answer retrospectively in fifty to a hundred years. But I believe that these are the paradigmatic political questions of our times. So I think it’s time to write why I do not support Sanders.
Over the last few months Sanders’ supporters have felt comfortable, indeed impelled, to tell me and the world why they oppose/dislike/hate Clinton. I have not said much about why I don’t support him, in part because I like him and the causes he has supported throughout his career. As a journalist pointed out he (and Trump, like it or not) have effectively expanded the “Overton window” or spectrum of public issues/positions that are legitimate and mainstream to discuss and push. The other reason I have not focused much on why I don’t support Sanders (apart from his fragile electability) is because I’ve found it more interesting to write about why I support Clinton, including how I engage my concerns. But after the appalling increase in negative campaigning by Sanders, I think I should say why I don’t support him. -- I don’t trust demagoguery, especially because of what it tends to produce in the movements it spawns. It tends to produce a self-righteous narrowness among followers, potentially spawning movements that risk becoming reactive and radically repressive of dissent in their own ways. Sanders’ campaign and supporters have tended to project those who don’t join them as the unenlightened, the bad, and/or the handmaidens and footmen of status quo privilege. The attacks on Elizabeth Warren for not endorsing Sanders provide an example. Recently, the increasingly shrill self-righteousness of Sanders’ campaign and supporters (not all, but many of those who make themselves most heard; and if you feel that Sanders and you are mischaracterized by this description, you are feeling, a little, the way Clinton and many of her supporters feel) has reminded me of Yuri Zhivago’s “Revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order… but for decades thereafter, … the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.” (from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago) Ok, that is a bit strong and it calls for a much more complex discussion of revolutionary change (and the structures of oppression that revolution at its best seeks to transform), but you get the idea! -- I don’t think he can do what he says he wants to and I would be uncomfortable supporting someone just because he says what I want. From my reading of his record, his speeches, and his interviews, he has neither the knowledge, nor the sociopolitical networks and legislative support, nor a strategy for building the sociopolitical networks and legislative support to make his most visionary statements move forward (leave alone be achieved) in four years. -- I think his electability is more fragile than Clinton’s. Against Trump, he possibly/probably would win. I think the Republicans are going to replace Trump in some way or the other, and with any other Republican (including Cruz) I think the red-baiting and other more general attacks on Sanders (which we have not seen any of yet, and not because the substance and planning aren’t out there) will make it very possible, even likely, that he will lose. And we have potentially three Supreme Court nominations under the next President. -- I think he is impassioned for the right things and good-hearted. I also think he’s fuzzy in his thinking and I don’t like or trust his advisers. |
AuthorMeenakshi Chakraverti Archives
December 2023
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