Sick of the 'Anxiety Left'? Me Too. How Have We Gotten Here?
Language, Experience, and Political Derangement
Now that Cornel West is referring to Donald Trump as a ‘neo-fascist’ and Tucker Carlson is being labelled time-and-again as ‘far-right’, we are witnessing yet further disintegration of the ligature that connects words to reality in our political discourse.
I really have reached the end of my patience with the febrile political style that is rampant among the increasingly deranged metropolitan cadres of our political class.
I grew up in a milieu of left politics anchored in the lived lives of people who struggled with, in, and through material reality. It was a politics that drew on a deep history going back to the Depression and the world wars. It was informed by suffering and exploitation, despite the best efforts of psychologically stable working people to lead normal, functional, and socially constructive lives. One grandfather fought against the Japanese in the Far East, the other worked on industrial boilers as the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on him, and I grew up in a city devastated by neoliberal shock doctrines and deindustrialisation. These formed the bedrock of a politics whose primary objective was to deliver peaceful, prosperous, and free lives to working people, who didn’t need to be told what was important in life and what was not.
In such a grounded environment, the labels ‘fascist’ and ‘far-right’ were reserved for political positions that were either irrational and enraged, or the programmatic anti-democratic actions of ruthless power centres. Political leaders of popular movements, equipped with a reasonable analysis of the time, and who struggled against the arrayed mass of established power and conventional authority, were not fascists. Journalists with broad support among the people and who were dissenting from elite orthodoxies would never be thought ‘far right’.
Of course, part of the problem lies in the association of these individuals with a national political idiom. Such has become anathema among those who have been spoon-fed the ahistorical cultural propaganda of globalist elites for the last three decades. Unfortunately, such attitudes rest on the currently prevalent but facile equation of nationally-oriented politics with fascism, as though the history of nationalism were not a great spectrum of political, economic, cultural, and social movements, but a single phenomenon reducible simply to ethno-nationalist chauvinism. This is an ignorance that misses how 19th and 20th century liberal, social democratic, and even communist movements were essentially built around a national framework of self-determination ranging from German federalists, through Scandinavian dem-socs, to cuban revolutionaries.
Of course, there is also the increasingly tenuous language-politics of the left that has taken us down a road ever-more rarefied, recherché, cliché, and all those other frenchisms so appropriate for a tendency imported unreflexively from left-bank Parisian poststructuralism. Obsessed with the micro-meaning in words, the metro-left have predictably led themselves out onto a hairy edge, where their own language use has long departed from the ordinary language that keeps any movement or group anchored in the broader society. The result is inevitably detachment from the demos and alienation among the popular classes.
However, there is a third element at work here. Something has happened to that swathe of people who populate the upper middle class cadres of the metro-elite, the broader managerial-professional class, and the encompassing intellectual wasteland that is now the cultural default-left. Whether it is a consequence of the techno-revolution, too much time behind the laptop, too much time indoors and away from the visceral experience of a physical life well-lived, who can say? Perhaps its Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism reaching its most perfect expression. Maybe it’s all of this combined with the language fetishism and ideological propaganda?
The centrepiece of this psycho-social trend is Trump derangement, and it is real. The imbalance and naivety one finds in its expression is as widespread as it is shocking, and it has infiltrated thinking on the pseudo-left in all manner of issues, topics, and concerns. Forensic material analysis of America First politics through the neoliberal era has no place. Historically informed class analysis is utterly absent. Understanding of recurrent patterns, traditions, and figures in American political culture from Jackson to Bill Bryan are never considered. Instead, Trump is Hitler and anyone who mentions the American nation in anything other than scathing condemnation is a fascist.
The roots of this derangement are not entirely clear, but there is something at work here deeper than media-driven lies and thought reform in the institutions. There is an underlying instability in the personality formation of many on the metro-left
Where is the critical, seasoned, and material analysis of the conjuncture that used to be the bread and butter of organic left politics? It seems to be buried under a mass of chattering hysteria and bourgeois personality disorders, which drive forward a politics of self-delusion lost in a cloud of words and symbols slowly drifting away from the lifeworld of most people (including those that peddle it).
I’m open to any suggestions. Speculative explanations are very welcome.
But as I said, I’m losing patience with it. The point is being reached where words like ‘fascist’ and ‘far-right’ do not merely switch me off, but actually provoke a counter-response. When you use these words as recklessly as you do, you earn my obloquy and opposition, you draw down my critical energies, you open yourself to merciless analytical scrutiny. I enjoin readers to follow me in the disrespect that this discourse deserves and focus building a new, organic set of ligatures between words and the emerging material reality that the status quo metro-left can no longer get their heads around. Let’s leave these inadequates in the rear view mirror, and articulate together a more psychologically stable and intellectually honest language of political discourse for a better political future!
How did we get here?
It's a question I have asked on my stack so many times. I have no good answers. I'm not sure there is a single explanation as much as a horrible combination of factors all parasitically feeding off each other.
The standard feature seems to be a rise in emotive 'reasoning' - with what are quite strong emotions evoked. I believe this has been deliberately and cynically cultivated over the last few decades.
We now have a whole slew of people who genuinely believe that someone like J.K.Rowling, for example, is some sort of evil monstrosity. Very few of them can, of course, properly explain what she has written or said that makes her so evil. It's almost like they've been programmed with a set of opinions on certain topics and certain people. There has been no real processing of the information going on - just a now deeply ingrained belief that JKR is worthy of contempt and hate.
The whole "Queers for Palestine" thing is another example of this controlled zombie-like response. Whatever one thinks of the rights and wrongs of what's happening in Gaza I can assure you that whilst Queers might be for Palestine, Palestine is most definitely not for Queers.
The primary tool in this emotional shaping has been the casting of the world into the oppressed/oppressor binary. Even the language is ridiculous and overblown. The vast majority of people in western societies are not 'oppressed' in any meaningful sense of that word. This doesn't mean that they do not face prejudices or discrimination, at times, but oppressed? Nah - they've no idea what that word actually means.
Yet, we are told, there's this invisible, magical, intersecting web of oppressions that is acting on those without the appropriate 'privileges', at all times and in all things. It's the most outrageously over-exaggerated nonsense, of course. But it's the primary lens through which the world is 'explained' for many.
I'm very much like you - I basically grew up as a traditional 'lefty' where the primary focus was on preventing exploitation of the powerless and preventing economic exploitation. It was all about trying to get a fair deal for those at the bottom of the heap who, however hard they worked, lived in a constant state of hardship and worry. It was about trying to ensure basic human dignity in a world where many of those at the top were all too ready to exploit others.
The problem, as I grew older, wasn't that my goals and ideals had changed, but that they were tempered with pragmatism. How, exactly, does an extreme socialist system actually *achieve* all those things? The answer is that it can't. Neither can extreme free market capitalism. Both extremes are bloody awful when it comes down to it.
We used to be able have reasonable arguments about where the balance between the two extremes lay. But it was mostly within an economic/class paradigm. Nowadays, I haven't a clue where I sit 'politically' - the old, traditional, understandings of left and right are not applicable anymore.
A far more appropriate distinction today is between those of a more authoritarian bent and those of a more libertarian bent. I'm all for the basic principle of liberty insofar as that does not infringe upon the liberty of others. Obviously that basic principle needs fleshing out somewhat - but you get the general idea.
Today, I scroll through the news in a kind of awestruck horror at what's happening. It feels like the door is closing on the golden age of liberty and, if we're not careful, it will never return, because the tools at the disposal of the authoritarians are vastly more powerful than they ever were.
It's quite extraordinary to see so many people wanting *more* government control over what is, and isn't, "misinformation" - as if governments anywhere, ever, told the truth! It's so unbelievably crazy that politicians are lecturing us about things like trust and misinformation when they are, with some exceptions, amongst the most duplicitous and untrustworthy on the planet - and also the biggest purveyors of misinformation by a long, long, way. Yet here we are - lots of seemingly rational people arguing that we need more governmental control of what we can post or read.
Talk about turkeys and Christmas! And how do they convince us of this? They use emotive arguments. They talk of the 'dangers' of misinformation - they talk of 'hate speech' - which are just sleight-of-hands stopping us from keeping our eyes on the prize. They have their eyes firmly fixed though - it's a total control of the info-sphere - that's what they're after.
The rise of conflicts, bitter divisions, over-emotional arguments - all grist to the mill, and by design. It has always been thus - in the terms of my more traditionally leftist upbringing you don't want the workers of the world to unite - you keep them squabbling amongst themselves.
It's amazing, really. If you can convince half the electorate that the Orange Man of Doom is more Hitler than Hitler ever was, then you can dismantle democracy itself (as is happening with all the lawfare etc) as a pretext to 'save' democracy. And the zombie-like drones will cheer it all on - not realizing what is being dismantled before their very eyes, because they're not looking in the right place. They're looking at the Don of Despair and thinking that he's the enemy.
All of this can only happen if you continually prioritize emotional things over the rational. Both are important - and just like with economics and socialism vs free markets, there's a balance to be struck. But we've had 'safety' and 'emotionalism' drummed into us for the last couple of decades now. That's why we have things like counselling for students who might get 'traumatized' by attending a lecture on free speech. Yes, this really happened.
Factor in the immediate emotional hit from social media - the platforms were designed to stoke outrage, because outrage sells - and you have one hell of a problem on your hands.
Anyway, that's quite enough of my rambling for today - I just wish I had better answers, because if we don't fix this madness soon, we're fucked.