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[...] feminism and Wall Street are birds of a feather, perfectly united in the person of Hillary Clinton.
What made possible that conflation was the absence of any genuine left [...] any comprehensive left narrative that articulated the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters with a fulsome critique of financialization, on the one hand, and with an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-hierarchical vision of emancipation, on the other. [...]
[...] Does anyone believe that a Clinton presidency would have gone after Wall Street and the 1 per cent? That it would have diminished rather than stoked populist rage? In fact, the rage felt by many Trump supporters is quite legitimate, even if much of it is currently mal-directed towards immigration and other scapegoats. The proper response is not moral condemnation but political validation, while redirecting the rage to the systemic predations of finance capital.
yesss
[...] Trump's victory marked a defeat for the holy alliance of emancipation with financialization. But his presidency offers no resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no secure hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and unstable situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this situation, there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to build a new 'new left'.
Nancy Baeser
[...] Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nations. The promised service economy and knowledge-based society turned out to be smaller than the industrial society that was fast disappearing; hence a constant expansion of the numbers of people who were no longer needed, the surplus population of a revived capitalism on the move, watching helplessly and uncomprehendingly the transformation of the tax state into the debt state and finally into the consolidation state [...]
[...] the surviving Blair supporters in the Labour Party believed they could persuade their traditional voters to remain in the EU with a lengthy catalogue of the economic benefits of membership, without taking the uneven distribution of those benefits into account.It did not occur to a liberal public cut off from the everyday experience of the groups and regions in decline that the electorate might have wanted the government they had installed o show greater interest in their concerns than in international agreements. [...]
I love the connotations of "surviving Blair supporters"
[...] The Berlin Wall [...] signified that capitalism was not the only option, that an alternative to it, although a failed one, existed. By contrast, the walls that we see rising today [...] don't stand for the division between capitalism and communism but for a division that is strictly immanent to the global capitalist order. [...]
in the next sentence he describes it as "a nice Hegelian move" which is the most Zizek thing ever
[...] Why then should the left leave this field of nationalist passions to the radical right [...] Could the radical left not mobilize these same nationalist passions as a mighty weapons against the dominant force in today's global society, the increasingly unfettered reign of rootless financial capital? [...]
Right-wing populism thrives because the world of the working classes has been destroyed by corporate capitalism and has become devalued by cultural progressive elites who, from the 1980s onwards, focused their intellectual and political energy on sexual and cultural minorities, thus generating fierce culture wars. Once the world of the working class was destroyed and spurned, it could be restored through promises of lost racial, religious and ethnic privileges.
Trumps election is a wake-up call for the left throughout the world. However polarized the worlds of the cultural elites and the conservative working-class may have become, the left has no choice but to re-engage with the moral world of lives that have been torn asunder by the rippling effects of colonialism and capitalism. Short of that, in the long run, liberalism may be doomed to extinction.
[...] As Arjun Appadurai observed a decade ago, 'the nation state has been steadily reduced to the fiction of its ethnos as the last cultural resource over which it may exercise full domination'. The unintended consequence of macroeconomic policies following the mantra 'there is no alternative' is that identity politics have taken over the centre of European politics. The market and the internet have proven to be powerful forces for increasing the choices of individuals, but they have eroded the social cohesion of Western societies because both reinforce the inclination of individuals to satisfy their natural preferences, such as preferring contact with people like themselves and staying away from strangers. We live in a world that is more connected but also less integrated. Globalization connects while disconnecting. [...]
[...] the Enlightenment, in which the idea of the European Union is intellectually rooted, demands universal citizenship. But universal citizenship requires one of two things to happen: either poor and dysfunctional countries have to become places in which it is worthwhile to live, or Europe has to open its borders to everybody. Neither is going to happen anytime soon, if ever. Today the world is populated by many failed states nobody wants to be a citizen of, and Europe does not have the capacity, nor will its citizens ever agree, to keep the borders open.