Re: <nettime> nettime-l Digest, Vol 9, Issue 6

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 7:41 AM Francis Nowak via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

>
> You can't hold the center together when everybody has the ability to
> publish their opinions, without the party, or even against the party, to
> 88.7 million followers.
>

This change in the media system is for sure a big part of the institutional
breakdown that Ted is talking about. Maybe it even explains the heightened
venality of newspapers like the NYT or the Washington Post, which now have
to compete with the delirious 24/7 passions of social media. However there
are also profound splits of public opinion in the face of real challenges
to which corporate liberalism has no answers.

The US, like other developed countries, is faced with intense deskilling
and technological unemployment, which is about to get a lot worse with AI.
It's experiencing an immigration surge brought on by the neoliberal
destruction of social systems in less developed countries, especially
Venezuela which it has attacked through extremely damaging sanctions. Its
global free trade and military alliance systems, in place since WWII, are
now breaking down under the pressure from Russia and China. A sense of
profound alienation and rage has reawakened among its minority populations,
who see their own fates mirrored in Israel's mass murder of Palestinians
using American bombs. And behind all that, out of a dark cloud reminiscent
of the Dust Bowl, come the ecological disasters. There is a reason, indeed
many reasons, why the political institutions are breaking down.

Radical historians of the New Left in the 1960s, like Wiliam Appleman
Williams and Gabriel Kolko, identified corporate liberalism as the power
structure to which both mainstream parties were entirely beholden. This is
an imperial power structure, depending on the military protection of
so-called "free trade" abroad, as well as the police suppression of
oppressed classes at home. The only way to maintain the illusion of
democracy under these conditions was the control of information. And now
that's impossible.

I despise Trump but it's worth pointing out that he has carried out a
successful revolt against the old Republican elites who co-managed
corporate liberalism. Yes, there are many strategic actors pulling Trump's
strings, but he is also providing an answer - a sickening,
ethno-nationalist answer - to the contradictions of the old mainstream.
Close the border, withdraw from the imperial wars, get rid of all
environmental regulations, suppress all minorities and women too, reinstate
religious communitarianism and return to the extractivist industrialism of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries: that's the program of Trump and his
base. It is a response to the challenges I listed - a terrible and
unworkable one, but a response nonetheless.

In view of that response, Joe Biden took a lot of ideas from Bernie Sanders
and promised he would be a transformative president. But he does not have
the vision, the charisma or the personal will to fulfill his promise, nor
he does not have a unified Democratic party to back him up. What he has
delivered, along with the usual incremental social measures of the
Democrats, is a program for green capitalism and an attempt to reboot the
military alliance system - in other words, more corporate liberalism. His
constituency has broken because it is objectively split between the
oppressed classes, who now see the identity of imperial war abroad and
police repression at home, and the urban upper middle classes, who paid lip
service to George Floyd but in reality want nothing to ever change because
they already have it made. The weird moralism and rhetorical correctness of
these upper middle classes is, I think, the mask they have unconsciously
donned in order to protect themselves from a now obvious truth, that their
wealth is largely based on expropriation and upheld by violence.

So Joe Biden is a bust, but let's not blame him alone. The problem with the
Euro-American societies is that we are not producing either a vision or a
viable program for the challenges of the 21st century. It's true that the
oppositional forces of identity politics and nimby environmentalism are not
able to articulate a response on the scale of problems. But the governing
elites are not even trying. Instead, they are hypocritically promising the
opposite of what they deliver.

I hoped Biden would be transformative, based on his initial program. He's
not. I'll vote for him, and I agree he is likely to win. But I am disgusted
by the way the Democrats base their whole campaign on opposition to a
genuinely transformative president, namely Trump. This upper middle-class
moralism stifles everyone and blocks any real progress.

We need to create new leadership in this country. That's a whole-of-society
job. It did get started with Bernie in 2015 and it went a lot further
during Biden's campaign and first year in office. Whatever happens in the
next election, that work on both vision and program has to continue - or we
are all literally cooked. Because it ain't your grandpa's Dust Bowl coming
out of that growing dark cloud.

thanks for this good discussion, Brian
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