The Yellow Jackets movement in France and the rise of right wing racist and nationalist movement across Europe and the US are both symptoms of a popular rejection of the status quo: technocratic neoliberalism. We can point to a few figures on the world stage to identify this ideology: Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and the ‘mainstream’ Democratic party in the US, Justin Trudeau in Canada, Angela Merkel in Germany and Emanuel Macron in France. All would like to be represented as representatives of an ‘enlightened, progressive and effective free market democracy’. They are in favor racial equality, women’s rights, LGBT rights and general inclusiveness. They purport to be environmentalist, making sympathetic noises about climate change. Most importantly they portray themselves as reasonable, adult people who are in line with the broad social consensus, at least as devised by the upper and middle class educated city dwellers.
The reality is that they are in fact the polite faces of a fundamentally conservative ideology which seeks to preserve the status quo of global extractive capitalism. We find ourselves in a strange moment where the people in power are either neoliberal conservatives in the literal sense of attempting to preserve the status quo, or avowed ‘conservatives’ who are in fact a radical right-extremist reactionary force who rather than attempting to ‘conserve’ the status quo are pushing us towards a kind of anarcho-capitalist, nationalist and racist conception of the nation state. Importantly, both of these forces on the ‘left and right’ are aligned with the current true source of power: capital. The public is left to choose between racist corporatists who want to turn our society into the hunger games, and less racist corporatists who want us to hire more female prison guards and gay drone pilots. Both sides are bought and paid for by criminal bankers who are immune to prosecution, the true holders of all real power under late capitalism.
The election of Donald Trump, while powerfully motivated by American racism, is a sign of a kind of explosive nihilism in America. The upswell of support for Bernie Sanders and the rejection of Hilary Clinton are signs of a rejection of the neoliberal status quo. After the primary was stolen from Sanders by the DNC, and given the choice between two corporatists, one who was nakedly racist and obviously chaotic, the American public decided to throw a molotov cocktail into Washington DC and vote with their middle fingers. This included many voters who voted in the last cycle for Obama, buying into his messages of hope and change. They believe that Obama would provide a ‘nice’ solution to the current global order. His utter failure to wield the power of the state against the Wall Street bankers during the global financial crisis of 2008 at the moment of their greatest weakness signaled a total capitulation of political power against the power of capital. The failure of this promised change to materialize has curdled into anger, racism and hopelessness. We saw this process in Germany with the ascension of Adolf Hitler, exploiting the humiliation, economic misery and latent racism of the German people to form the Nazi party.
The people are governed through their consent, and that consent is becoming increasingly difficult to manufacture in the era of social media. Changes in the Facebook algorithm favoring local news sources unwittingly threw gasoline on the French protests against Macron’s latest fuel tax, amplifying the virality of ‘anger groups’ centered around local districts. These groups so far have been largely ideologically incoherent (as far as I can tell), with their only consensus being that they are rejecting the Macron program and the imposition of further taxes and austerity on a population which is already pressed against the wall economically. Through street demonstrations and riots, the insurrections have brought the government to it’s knees and forced it to backtrack on their taxes and attempt to address the problem of disenfranchisement. It has gotten to the point where there has been talk of the Police joining the strike against the government. If this happens, the movement may enter full blown revolution.
People are starting to realize our issues aren’t left and right, but top and bottom.
And the just solutions will come from the bottom-up. https://t.co/nI6mzP3E9k— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 20, 2018
Interestingly American leftist Alexandra Ocasio Cortez has pointed to this withdrawal of consent by the French people to be governed in a tweet yesterday as evidence that we are seeing a realignment from ‘left vs right’ politics to a ‘bottom vs top’ politics. I agree with her analysis and am interested to see what will happen next.
