The Art of Being on Time
History won’t make concessions for bad analyses of the current political trajectory
For N.S.
Political debates with ex-leftists about the current state of the world can take two forms: either they insist that what we are seeing is just a slightly more authoritarian modification of neverending “capitalism”, or they say that antisemitism is still a relevant threat.
Both are nostalgic and wrong.
We are obviously not seeing a continuation of the same old Capitalist Mode of Production, as Marxologists say, not even in a more neoliberally molded, i.e., anti-democratic way. We are also not seeing any relevant rise in antisemitism, the reference to which is precisely weaponized by the German government to attack dissent to the current thing as “hate speech”.
The paradigm shift since Covid is too grave. We are seeing an attack on democracy itself, which, if you know anything about political history at all, mirrors the development of the Weimar or the Italian Republic of the 1920s. Economically, then and now, the contradictions of the valorization postulate necessitate a new form of domination, of “government” in quotation marks. The war on civil rights and the civil subject is real again today. How big and hearty the laugh in the face of all those people was who insisted on freedom. How openly disgusted political commentators were with people using their right to protest, at least if it was for the wrong cause. How joyous was the display of contempt for us, the “unvaccinated”, when a valid vaccine passport was the only way to a warm meal in the winter. On top of it all, they say: your decision not to comply got us here in the first place.
As though you needed any further proof of the replacement of the relatively cozy warmth of even neoliberal capitalism by plain fascism, the summer of 2023 sees a global clamp down on free speech that the world has never seen before. In Ireland, the “Hate Speech bill” will be put into effect. In the UK, the “Online Safety bill” follows suit. In Germany, the “Network Enforcement Act” will be complemented by the “Digital Services Act” in the EU in August. Brazil has a supreme court judge going full Freisler, the president of the Volksgerichtshof in Nazi Germany. In the US, the Louisiana court ruling that government interference with Big tech companies to regulate speech was a violation of the first amendment was instantly denounced by our beloved New York Times as based on a “cherry-picked [the Dems love this term, ELL] legal analysis attached to an overbroad injunction.” Judge Doughty, the judge in charge, was instantly smeared as partial:
His perplexing line-drawing seems to make more sense when you consider how closely it tracks the specific facts in this case — for instance, episodes in which the government communicated with social media platforms about posts concerning the efficacy of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 or the efficacy of masks in combating the transmission of the coronavirus. If those issues seem to overlap a bit too neatly with recent conservative preoccupations, that’s because the case is part of a wider war conservatives believe they are fighting, in which tech executives and Democratic government officials are supposedly colluding to censor conservative voices.[1]
A war “conservatives believe they are fighting”? In which “tech executives and Democratic government officials are supposedly colluding to censor conservative voices”? Are we back to referencing a scenario in which the earth is supposedly revolving around the sun?
I’m unsettled by the easiness in which people who should know better overlook the installation of a fascist new regime in real time. Where has the honesty and sincerity gone in adequately judging current events in their plasticity – even if historical judgment is something you have to do in hindsight? Is the historical classification of the global regime change we are currently witnessing such a difficulty? Was Hegel right after all – that you cannot learn a thing from the past and must make the same mistakes again and again until you do – and when you do, it will be too late?[2]
All I know is this. Hitler’s Reich was just a foreplay to what we are going to see. If you think I’m being hyperbolical, read the NYT. It’s a pretty good indicator for the ideological consolidation of the ruling class. Preparation is all.
Cover girl: Harriet Wheeler in The Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends” (1990)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/opinion/federal-judge-biden-social-media.html?searchResultPosition=1
[2] I’m paraphrasing, obviously.
A "global regime change"? China is not going down this path, neither is Russia, nor India, nor Iran, nor vast swathes of the so-called Global South, with perhaps the partial (?) exception of Brazil, which you allude to above. This evolution towards neo-fascism is happening largely if not entirely within the decaying Liberal Democracies of the West (but not all, see Hungary). This isn't to say that challenges we face are not severe -- they are -- but this is clearly not a global trend, and we shouldn't confuse ourselves by thinking it is. This new fascism depends on highly authoritarian, highly centralized control; that makes the system exceedingly fragile and hence it will eventually collapse, but probably not before causing ferocious social and economic damage. It will be interesting to see which other countries in the West will eventually join Hungary in casting off the chains of our neoliberal lords and masters to embrace the multipolar, sovereigntist system of the East. It is so clearly the future.
The totalitarianism is already upon us. Asking nicely to please stop is not going to cut it. We need full-on resistance and community organizing, a tactic we mocked that has now gone full-on mainstream in all institutions-worldwide. Your post is not hyperbole. Now is not the time to coddle post-sitters. Now is the time to speak, to act, period. Resistance movements disrupt and are effective even in smaller numbers. Rogan and Petersen and Malone and Musk, along with the Peter McCulloughs and the RFK Jr and others--are attracting large followings for a reason. They speak truth, and only then do others feel safe in coming out of their cultural closets. They do not mince words. That’s what principled moral leaders do.