Re: <nettime> Brexit democracy

On 6 November 2017 at 15:44, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/06/2017 05:13 AM, David Garcia wrote:

The success of the slogan ‘Take Back Control” is cruscial to understand it speaks to the profound loss of agency that so many of us feel and how for many the capacity to disrupt politics as usual gave Brexit voters a sense of power.

This is spot on for the United States as well. Alas, in our country the wording for a very similar sentiment was very different: "Build That Wall." The many degrees of hatred condensed in such a statement have made it almost impossible to have any conversations with core Trump voters, who definitely want to hang on to their sense of empowerment. However, you can have conversations with centrist people who simply never would have spoken to strangers about politics before. Not just the Republicans, but also the plutocracy, the corrupt Democratic establishment and sometimes even the police and the military are critiqued in ways that were formerly taboo. Universal health care and climate change mitigation are increasingly seen by the Center Left as urgent needs. But it's tough to get to the three key questions: How do we restore democratic equality? Who is the 'we'? And is 'restore' the right word?

The Right has presented us with the demand for system change. So doing, they have responded to a deep and fully justified anxiety which the Democrats - and to some extent, even the post-68 Left - could not voice. But it's clear that Trump cannot produce the change, only its media-driven, hate-drenched simulacrum. The real thing is so much harder to achieve. It requires a political, economic, philosophical and even spiritual shift in each of the people who would be its agents. You cannot get that from a single leader or a single doctrine, much less a slogan. I can only speak from my own narrow position in society, among academics, artists and activists in a Midwestern city. Before we could successfully argue with Republicans on a train, we would have to have much deeper conversations among ourselves, while at the same time becoming much more sensitive to worlds beyond our enclosing spheres.

Brian

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Ivan Knapp

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