Re: <nettime> the great re-alignment

[David Garcia via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Felix wrote: It's clear, the liberal world order has collapsed and will 
not recover. Not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and 
embroiled in wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney [1]), 
but also at the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the 
status of periphery had has become present in many forms in the center, 
few will shed tears, except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. 
The pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order cannot 
provide justification and soft-power, with the genocide in Gaza the 
final nail in the coffin.

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Yes well said, there's been a collapse. In a recent article, Rafael Behr 
described a fault-line running through “what used to be definable as the 
singular “west” in terms of a contest between “liberal 
constitutionalists and nationalist crusaders.” The former” he argued 
“defend a 20th-century legacy of multilateral treaties, respect for 
democratic protocol and the rule of law. The latter style themselves as 
warriors in an existential, civilisational struggle against moral decay 
through “wokeism” and cultural dissolution in an immigrant horde.”

If we take Behr’s picture at face value, then yes the largest tent pole 
of liberal constitutionalism, the USA, just collapsed leaving the 
remaining constitutionalists as outliers blindly scrabbling and flailing 
under the flattened tent with no idea “on what basis solidarity can be 
re-built”.

From this perspective we must ask if this is the moment to simply 
abandon liberal constitutionalism? Is it a busted flush? Are 
“enlightenment rationalist values, including “the rule of law”, “human 
rights” and the “public sphere” itself, mere “bromides”? Or can national 
and international solidarity ONLY be re-built on some version of a 
global constitutional order? Yes its deeply flawed. But as a point of 
departure amidst the ruble, when all’s said and done, what else actually 
is there?

Let me point to a hyper-local positive micro-example from my own neck of 
the woods on how “re-building solidarity" might begin. This week the 
UK’s deputy Labour Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, signalled that 
restrictions will be placed on Britain’s long standing “right to buy 
scheme” on any new social housing currently being built. The possibility 
that tenants in social housing should have the right to buy their home 
has for many decades been core tenet of Thatcher era neo-liberalism and 
had the effect of progressively depleting the stock of affordable public 
housing.

This is a small but non-trivial example because it instigates a 
materially consequential challenge to the core neo-liberal aspiration of 
a “property owning democracy”. That was part of a wider policy of 
undermining the public sphere from transport to culture and the 
privatisation of basic amenities. OK its only one of many tiny examples. 
And in the face of Trumpian victory its nothing. But still it shows how 
constitutionalist socialism can still challenge and reverse the policies 
of reactionary nationalist crusaders.

Re-establishing a shared reality begins with demonstrating the value of 
the public sphere in the widest sense of the word. Its where we start to 
re-build new coalitions of pragmatic resistance piece by piece, based on 
a key communitarian principal of "belonging not othering".

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