Why There Is No Left, Left (and Francis Fukuyama)

((Perhaps like Francis, I bit off more than I could chew. I started this post and set it aside for a while, but still I decided to finish and post.  Whatever you may think of anything I say, at least I try to offer some points.  Francis, given the opportunity in numerous powerful fora across the world, took only the opportunity to say that things were “highly puzzling and complex,” and added very little else. (Yes, we all write books—a basic function of anyone who wants to write a book is to provide a précis or an abstract; if you really want to, or just plain have to, then you just have to and you will.  If you have a point to make, you will make it, so it is no valid criticism to say Francis also had a book but made puzzlingly little effort to précis it in any meaningful way.  .  .he could have and didn’t.  At least I tried.))

 Under the title of “America’s Plutocracy,” one-time darling of the right Francis Fukuyama has now written a querulous op-ed about why poor Americans always support the most right-wing candidates who do them the most damage and exploit them the most.  (You can read the whole book, or failing that read excerpts everywhere, like here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/money-power-and-class-in-america/article4666223/)  His insights, perhaps predictably from his eyrie, are bleary.

 Fukuyama seems ready to assert a plutocracy, but he’s lean, lean, lean on details as to how this came about.  Take this excerpt:

 

It has come as a surprise to many on the left that Mr. Romney – the “sneering plutocrat,” in the words of New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait – has pulled alongside or even ahead of Mr. Obama in some polls. They shouldn’t be so shocked. Money, power and class continue to play out in American politics in highly complex and puzzling ways. Plutocracy has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis. And it just might push one of its prime beneficiaries, Mitt Romney, to a victory at the polls next month.

 

First of all, it isn’t a surprise to people on the left.  It stopped being that a long time ago, arguably decades ago.  Shocked?  From where he sits, I doubt that is a verb Fukuyama can even estimate the meaning of, unless he visited himself as a wild-eyed Republican radical gameboy a quarter of a century ago.  “Money, power, and class. . .play out. . . in highly complex and puzzling ways.”  Good one, Francis.  Thanks for your insight.  Now have another drink. 

 This, this is what Fukuyama has come to, chiding people for not realizing they’re being ripped off and their country, and western, success and mores are being sunk because it’s “highly puzzling and complex”?  Good of him to be so highlily and puzzlingly “complex.”  Next time I’m trying to solve a puzzle, I’ll call you, Francis.  Four letters, meaning unaccustomed to insight, lacking oppressive wit, or just being a patronizing gasbag. . .hm.

Well, since so few others are willing to take a shot, but since it is (or I hope is at least starting to be) on a lot of people’s minds, let’s have a go. Let’s try to answer the question of why the people (coal miners, autoworkers, cashiers, etc.) who can least benefit from, or afford to support right-wing candidates, have become their greatest supporters.  Let’s try to answer that question, of why the poorest people support the most right-wing candidates, just like in good ol’-Mussolini days (by the way, did he really make the trains run on time, or did he just run them over you if you didn’t support him?  Anyone with knowledge, feel free to remark.)

 Anything I will suggest will naturally blend into, bleed into other ideas you or I might have, but to try to prevent the kaleidoscope from crushing into a maroon-black centre, I will try to separate them out (a bit). 

1)  Let’s go back to the beginning.  Reagan wins, Gorbachev acquiesces, capitalism wins, communism loses.  Ok.  But look at things now.  Rampant communist-capitalist country (China) wins, capitalist-oligarch system returns with a bang (Russia), and former “socialist” satellites like Poland and Slovenia and Slovakia and the Czech Republic rocket ahead.  Turns out these last countries kind of like things they grew accustomed to under communism, like health-care, transit, and so on.  Throughout most of the United States, “transit” is a word you could only encounter in a Latin class at Harvard, but in Europe, it’s used to increase efficiency and productivity and enhance capitalist goals.  A person can travel at night in Romania, but in Tennessee?  Get serious. And that’s a problem, if you want to have an economy, much less a community or a country.

2)  Let’s take on the obvious, the so-called demise of unions.  Well, union voters never were or are left-wing voters or Democrats.  Statistically, that can be proven.  Most union voters admired the boss and wanted to be like him, even if capitalist state structures made it virtually impossible they ever could be.  What unions do, and what the right knows, is something far more insidious—they create, as the right knows, that one thing most anathema to the right—community.  People get together.  They talk.  (Family, amongst the right, doesn’t mean “family values”—it means “my family, right or wrong.”) They share insights and family goals and gossip and information.  They have BBQs, play softball.  They realize they’re all in this together, and have a mutual stake in making their lives better.  If you look at the media, it’s all about wages and strikes, but if you look to the strategists of the right, you know what they’re trying to undermine.  Why did American slave-buyers make an explicit point of separating families, mothers and fathers from children?  Why did American slave-buyers make sure no slaves came from the same West African village?  Because if they did, they could _communicate_.  And if you’re in the top 1%, the last thing in the world you want is for the bottom 99 to be able to communicate.

So yes, unions, in the formal sense, have been withering, but it isn’t because of strikes or agitation for higher wages—it’s because the increasingly powerful 1% has determined that working people must not be allowed to communicate.  A 2% or a 4% wage increase is irrelevant; an engaged, informed, interested workplace is sheer terror for the right.

3) So tiresome it’s not even worth bringing up, but here we go.  Only an American could think this, but an American I know pointed out that, sure, a lot of people in America were toothless and dirt-poor, and would never, ever eat anything more than raccoon, but they were embodied (embalmed, drunk?) with the idea that, if they ever did discover oil on their land, or somewhere, they sure didn’t want anybody else taxing them.  If they won the lottery, or a distant uncle left them oil shares in a will, then no G-man was ever gonna take it away. Call it anticipatory or pre-emptive selfishness. It’s the American dream, a fantasy the nightmare of which so many Americans end up living out, especially if they get sick and lose everything because of medical bills.  The idea that someday you’ll just somehow get rich, like on TV.  Lord knows how long most Americans carry this dream into their middle and old ages, but many do.  They really think one day they’re going to get rich, and when they don’t, they want to make sure that no-one tries to make their Cokes cost .01 to .02 more.  It is to weep.

4) But that feeds into education.  Education rates have been embarrassingly low in the US forever, and they have been getting lower for a long time in Canada owing to the ongoing separation of classes and increasing inaccessibility of higher education.  If you can keep people stupid, you can keep them thinking that, somehow, with their toothless grins, they, too, will turn out to be Romneys.  Say nothing of girls in Afghanistan or Pakistan; there are probably countless black girls in Texas, or native girls in northern Canada, who’d take a bullet in the head if they could get an education and escape the cycle of hopelessness they’ve been born to.  When was the last time a U.S. politician’s son or daughter was harmed in an American war?  That’s now left to poor people who will sign up to take a bullet because it may be the only shot at grappling out of poverty that they can imagine.  Keep the people in a nasty, brutish, and mean state of fear and aggressiveness, and they will not think about making common cause with others.

5) And then there is technology and how that affects interaction.  Facebook and so on, blah, blah, it seems too tiresome even to discuss.  But people increasingly see themselves as private islands and VIPs.  Even in despair, on notecards, teens take to the web to express their individual hopelessnesses and have them magnified a thousand times over.  Young people could never imagine actually joining a political party and sitting through meetings and consulting with others and trying to make a positive difference.  No, that’d take too long.  Thus, NGOs and eco-tourism and the like are much more popular.  Students I’ve known shave their heads for cancer and think that’s resume material, that they should get a special commendation for it.  I imagine I’ve known over 10 000 post-secondary students, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of more than about 3 who could actually give a care about politics.  But volunteer at a food bank?  Oh sure, because that gives instant feelgood gratification and can go on your resume.  Try to do something about why we’d even need food banks in some of the very richest places on the entire planet?  No, that wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t give that immediate sense of being a great person.  You can shave your head and go on facebook, but going to a meeting and eating old donuts and drinking lousy coffee in somebody’s apartment does not, not cut it on facebook.  If the only way you can imagine expressing yourself is on strictly individual terms, then you’re either right-wing, or, yeah, you’ll spend a few months in Ghana building a water pump that will break down when you’re on the plane home and then get a job with a bank.  Sure, people are disaffected with politics, for countless reasons—when have they never not been?  But I hold to my point—that a technologically enabled sense of the person as island has contributed to an increasing unwillingness to engage in grassroots change-positive action.  Signed a petition on facebook lately?  Good for you.  Might as well put “brushed my teeth” on your resume.

6) This last does come to the democratic deficit.  It used to be that just about any party would urge people to “get out and vote!” because that was kind of an obvious, universally sanctioned thing to say, like “take care!” or “don’t drink and drive.”  But, of course, in the age of robo-calling and voter suppression and attack ads and the like, the mantra is more like “please slip on the ice and have to go to the hospital on voting day.”  Harper has imbibed all the tactics steeped in experience by his Republican mentors, and he knows that, if he can just slice and dice the electorate finely enough, the base and 5% is all he needs.  Ergo, yes, disaffect everyone you possibly can, and turn them off politics as much as you possibly can, through sleazy tactics, illegal campaign donations winked at by meaningless bodies like Elections Canada and bystander courts, proroguing, and so on and on.  Keep the people out, and you will keep the left out, too.  The closer you can get to 1% doing all the voting, the closer you get to Atlas shrugging at the wimps on the beach he commands.

7a) And this suggests the fourth estate, a concept one can only find in old dictionaries now.  Time was, the media had a role in informing people about what was going on, but, with the mainstream media being univocally right and increasingly concentrated, what few progressive voices are heard in local papers or on public stations are like whispered prayers in a stadium full of vuvzelas.  Now more than ever, journalists fear losing their jobs for not supporting right-wing causes, and/or desire above all to emulate their masters, so that, like a, say, Mike Duffy, they can eat soft donuts in a plush leather chair all day if they want.  Many know this one, with the “journalist” gushing over the criminal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtRkZ3i1ERQ

7b) But oh we do have lots of media, that 24-hr news cycle that turns a major issue into a one-minute hit, like a 400-page omnibus bill supplants a past process which would have seen legislation studied and mulled.  That 24-hr news cycle breeds contempt for politicians we are familiar with, and like our general computer world, makes us fatigued at the notion of having to spend more than 140 characters thinking about anything.  It was funny trying to watch relatively sober organs like the New York Times Magazine dutifully trying to come up with serious features, week after week, about cartoonish, inane Republican candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain and Rick Perry who were the 24-hr news cycle’s flavours of the week.  There simply was no there, there.  Back in the day, people like that wouldn’t even have made the first cut of media attention.  But 24-hr news makes us insatiable for Palins and their spinoff shows and the spinoff shows of the offspring, and so on.  Politicians themselves simply can’t be, or become, or afford to be reflective.  They’ve got to propose the simplest solutions to the most complex problems, the father of which in recent Canadian history is Presto Manning.

8) Related to some if not most of the above, is a loss of secular belief, a faith in ourselves that we all could actually do something positive that would benefit us all.  We can now only see ourselves on facebook (with lots of friends), or, if we’re lucky, tv.  In the 1990s, Ontario’s Mike Harris government, keen for right-wing cred, helped a private consortium to just go ahead and build a private toll highway, the 407.  The public sector could have built that, and the public could have reaped the gains.  Everyone knows Ontario is in a hard place right now, so why can’t anybody fathom why it is perverse that the millions upon millions of dollars that *could* have flowed right back to Ontario citizens are now flowing into a few private clutches?  Casino billionaire (a man who takes jobs from others) Sheldon Adelson spent, at a very modest estimation, 53 million to try to elect first Gingrich, then Romney (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2012/11/08/why-sheldon-adelsons-election-donations-were-millions-well-spent/).  How many jobs could $53M create, in America or anywhere?  53 million.  Think about it.  Shelley could have built a factory to employ disaffected Republicans for decades and kept 100s of them in work until they were pensioned off.  They could have made. . .bumper stickers, or license plates.

9) Penultimate closing thought.  It was interesting to see some of Ken Burns’ documentary about the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the dirty 30s lately, and to read in the New York Times magazine lately about the basketball franchise there.  Singly or doubly, these media emanations offered intriguing data.  OK always was a Republican state, but during the dust bowl, FDR did his best, and told it like it was, that no president could control the weather.  The government offered employment and did what it could, and OK went Democrat for a time (cf. the essentially duly reviled fleeing Brit R. B. Bennett in Canada, whose austerity buggies were but the wry name representing real sacrifice of people more stoic than prineer anywhere).  Despite the incredible privations, the suicides and so forth, it doesn’t look like anyone just up and starved. That didn’t seem to happen.  There was a government.  It wasn’t like New Orleans lately. Then OK went back Republican and is now.  But after it was bombed by a white-supremacist far-right looney tune, OKC began to rebuild.  And rebuild how?  Well, duh, by beginning to work together on things, and actually *accepting* things like penny-fraction civic taxes so that roads and galleries and monuments and parks and so forth could get built.  So it just goes to show that you don’t need to be far-right anti-tax in order to progress; you can be a Republican, and have a park.  Incredible.  If only the Canadian government could go on a fact-finding mission to Oklahoma.

10)  A closing thought.  So much has been written about how the Republicans are so out of touch with the changing demographics of America that they will have a hard time getting re-elected again without moderating their policies.  Probably that’s an overstatement, but there’s much to it, still and all—if Republicans can’t appeal to more than just the old white men, paraphrasing the much criticized but not so inaccurate words of candidate Obama, who cling to their guns (and Bibles they can’t read much less comprehend), then the Republicans are in trouble.  But things change.  I am more worried about the demographics in Canada.  I’m not eager to see a coalition of the NDP and the Liberals, but there is much to be said for MP Pat Martin’s point that, given our non-representative political system, Harper can be Prime Minister until he gets bored just by getting 1/3 of voters to vote for him.  That is a democracy?  And the PM has wasted no time while he’s been PM trying to shut down voters—robocalling false voting stations, using lying attack ads, sucking up taxpayer money on government propaganda ads that Putin studies with envy—even wasting your money and mine—close to a million of it—to find out how much the ethnic vote (read: Asians and Indians) likes him.  This is *your* government, spending *your* money to promote itself and self-strategize (http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1287450--immigration-ministry-paid-for-media-monitoring-of-minister-jason-kenney-s-image), but apparently it’s of little consequence to Canadians.  Funner to shave one’s head to fight cancer, instead.  Pity no-one can find a link between shaving heads and creating accountable systems that maximize results.  Want to crowdsource?  Try not shaving your head.  Try supporting your dying buddy by having a meeting to get together people to try to come up with a way to figure out how we can maximize health care dollars and affect or create government towards providing the best cures for the greatest number of people, including your buddy/mom/friend, etc.  No?  Not cool enough?  Sorry.

Sorry.

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