In the recent U.S. Presidential election, whichever side you voted for, money won.
One party was aligned to neoliberal rationality and the other, the victors, represented maverick disruption. Either way, corporations won.
For more than two centuries, money stole liberty from the people. Corporate apologists eroded individual integrity in favour of laissez-faire, free enterprise, and neoliberal capitalism.
After the Cold War, promoting “liberty” for money world-wide, corporations gained neoliberal outsourcing, de-regulation and tax reduction. As a quid pro quo, newly-educated worker/consumers sought various forms of social and cultural liberation.
However, with states captured, rule by supposed rational “elites” has been giving way to rampant oligarchy.
The Democrats and similar parties need to “get back to the grassroots”. More than that, left- and social-liberals must rediscover the Enlightenment understanding of liberty belonging not to corporations but to the “preservation” of all individuals through meal-sharing.
Capitalism has abandoned neoliberalism and gone disruptive
FOLLOWING perestroika and glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, capitalism’s boosters trumpeted “liberty” worldwide. Demanding liberation for all, a new Pax Americana would make everywhere safe for corporations.
Under big money’s global message of freedom, such left-liberal political leaders as David Lange, Paul Keating, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Helen Clark, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama pushed progressive cultural reforms with particular support for racial, women’s, gay and other rights.
The trap was that the “rights revolution” in such areas as feminism and multiculturalism provided cover for the corporate capture of government. Under the banner of neoliberalism, the same leaders pushed through deregulation, fiscal “rectitude”, lower corporate taxes, “flexible” job markets, outsourcing, lower trade “barriers”, individual responsibility, etc.
In the flurry of freedom, cultural liberation was outmatched by the bolstering of corporate power.
With governments now firmly in its grip, capitalism moved from neoliberalism to “disruption”. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg instructed: “Move fast and break things”. Powerful corporate leaders from Zuckerberg, Musk and down asserted their sacred right to do what they wanted – AI, rockets to Mars, armaments, opioids, drill, baby, drill…
Writing about the “disruption machine” in the New Yorker in 2014, Jill Lepore observed that innovation had become “the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics”.
Long-time Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher (Washington Post, 15/02/24) had “watched founders transform from young, idealistic strivers in a scrappy upstart industry into leaders of some of America’s largest and most influential businesses.” With few exceptions, “the richer and more powerful people grew, the more compromised they became.”
Upon Trump’s election as President, digital CEOs rushed for an audience, Swisher reported:
“There was a heap of money at stake, and they wanted to avoid a lot of damage the incoming Trump administration could do to the tech sector. … they also wanted contracts with the new government, especially the military. … More than anything, they wanted to be shielded from regulation, which they had neatly and completely avoided.”
The “invisible hand” of money unleashed disruption (and corruption), and broke pay parity, democracy and civility (not forgetting nature). Along with that, fewer and fewer billionaires supported left-liberal causes, preferring to boost their own fortunes by backing think-tanks and increasingly authoritarian ideologies.
Right-wing populists blamed the “politically correct”, the “woke”, university-educated “elites”, and mysterious liberals who controlled the “deep state”. Raising the “cloud of confusion”, Murdoch opinion-leaders baited their opponents until seeming actually to believe environmental degradation was an esoteric belief, and supporting women of colour impoverished white men.
Historian Ellen Schrecker has charted how the unprecedented invigoration of American universities during the Sixties eventually rebounded, when the right both attacked universities’ “liberalism” and corporatised them (in her studies of universities’ Lost Promise (2021) and Lost Soul (2010)).
Those endeavouring to save the welfare state, worker rights, universities, democracy and the environment have been tempted to display militancy. Israel’s brutality has now prompted campus protests in the Sixties manner.
Caution is warranted, nonetheless. Given how abusive politics suits aspiring demagogues, supporters of left/progressive/Green politics should prefer exposing the sin of over-commitment over indulging in it. Rather than shout back, the liberal left could usefully resort to honesty and openness, and appreciate complexity.
Arguing the benefits of civilised society also means understanding politics more deeply than as just warfare (“class struggle” already proved insufficient).
Contesting the authoritarian appeal of “the strong always win” means re-discovering lost principles. Countering disruption requires a return to something more like Enlightenment political philosophy, seized and shattered by capitalism.
The pre-capitalist basis of radicalism is described in Meals Matter: A radical economics through gastronomy (Columbia UP, 2020). The book also shows how money’s polemicists borrowed selectively from liberal-democratic arguments, and trampled on them.
Grassroots change comes from care and conversation at and about meals (at their different levels)
Australian Blak activist Natalie Cromb has just advocated, with “violence all around us”, for “reimagining our communities to be as they should be – caring, nurturing, healthy, happy and with enough”.
So much rancour of recent times has been hardened by over-simplification – and examples are to be found on all sides
IN RECENT YEARS, numerous governments and institutions accepted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. While its opening statement is widely regarded as reasonable, the definition then gives examples that suggest that criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitic.
Antisemitism is exhibited by, for example, denying “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.
Leaving aside the trickiness of whether Jews comprise a people, race, religion, culturaltradition or nation, the stricture nevertheless comes close to shutting down debate about Zionism.
This is despite many Jews themselves being anti-Zionist, sometimes on firmly religious grounds. “Jewish is defined by what Torah commands. Making our own state, or oppressing other people, is forbidden by Judaism and cannot be considered ‘Jewish,’” said Rabbi Yisroel Meir Hirsch (quoted in The Times of Israel, 23 May 2020).
Another example of antisemitism was: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
Reference to National Socialism might be painfully pointed, but that of itself would not invalidate such a denunciation.
The so-called “settlements” in the West Bank, throwing Palestinians off their land at gunpoint, certainly head in that direction. Likewise, many Jews worldwide decry the Netanyahu government’s campaign “to flatten” Gaza (President Macron’s description) or “genocide” (South Africa’s case in the World Court).
A definition of “antisemitism” overly protective of Israel and its policies risks rebounding, and many people now oppose Israel’s assaults without feeling particularly anti-Jewish, and resist campaigns to insist otherwise.
I have asked around about the name of a spurious argument of the type “anti-Israel = anti-Semitic”. My friend David suggested “false syllogism”, in that necessary are not always sufficient conditions. Any thoughts?
Let’s settle for the moment on saying it’s a classic case of over-commitment, in which powerful assertions foreclose qualifications and ambiguities. And over-commitment is a widespread sin.
While the authoritarian right specialises in zealotry, including provocative sneering, abuse, and inventive conspiracy theories, the liberal-left itself provides many examples.
Loss of “Voice” Referendum
An Australian instance of the sin of over-commitment has been a widespread claim that the loss of the Referendum on a Constitutional “Voice” for Indigenous people revealed the nation’s “embarrassing” racism, and set back the Indigenous cause.
Indigenous lawyer and “Yes” campaigner Noel Pearson had warned the voters: “There’s one choice that’s morally correct, and the other one will bring shame upon us, and we will have to wear that shame and dishonour for a long time to come” (The Guardian, 10 October, 2023).
Afterwards, campaign director for Yes23 Dean Parkin suggested that “the Australian people voted against recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first peoples of our nation” (Guardian, 26 January 2024).
The history of Australian government Indigenous policy is not happy, to say the least. But overly committed proponents simplified the Referendum to “Yes”/”No” on Indigenous recognition and support, over-riding complications concerning the approach and the Constitution itself.
One Indigenous Senator (Jacinta Nampijinpa Price) had described the proposed advisory assembly as patently unnecessary, while another (Lidia Thorpe) saw it as grossly insufficient. That’s a span of views.
The Referendum debate revealed widespread ignorance of the Australian Constitution, it was said. That’s not surprising for an uninspiring foundation narrative of colonial governments wrangling a federation.
Rather than resemble an intergovernmental memorandum, a Constitution would desirably set out a persuasive social contract, to which each member assents.
Even Constitutional experts stuck with narrow legalism rather than promote the need for a Constitution that actually sets out why and how we, the People, run this place for our own well-being.
As much as Anthony Albanese might have expected to emerge as a great, visionary Prime Minister, he mishandled a weak cop-out, a non-Treaty and non-Truth-telling way of slipping Indigenous recognition into an inadequate Constitution. Embarrassingly, the former “Rudd government’s street fighter” (Tony Wright, SMH, 23/02/10) failed to transcend narrow party sniping.
Out of the muddle, claims about a single “morally correct” vote arguably became over-commitment to the point of being self-defeating (in that, for instance, Albanese went quiet on the Indigenous cause).
Blame for housing unaffordability
In another Australian example, more than 40 housing, homelessness and community service organisations wrote to the Prime Minister and Opposition leader expressing concern that immigrants were being blamed for the prohibitive price and scarcity of housing.
“Migrant communities are being scapegoated for Australia’s housing crisis,” said Everybody’s Home spokesperson, Maiy Azize (19 December, 2023). “Governments have given handouts to investors, allowed unlimited rent increases, and stopped building homes for the people who need them. It’s a distraction to suggest that migrants are to blame.”
The letter acknowledged elsewhere that “migrant communities are being scapegoated as the primary reason for the housing crisis” (added italics). But why should migrants accept any responsibility whatsoever for the housing crisis?
Population pressures affect housing availability, but that’s not the migrants’ fault. Rather, the pressure results from immigration programs.
Selling immigration as “boosting the economy”, business lobbyists have pushed for cheaper workers, bigger markets, more construction projects, and other sources of “growth”.
Business lobbyists are happy to see migrants take the blame, just as they are not overly concerned that young people get locked out of the slow-motion housing bubble.
Just as alarm at Israeli policy about Palestine is not necessarily anti-Jewish, and disconnect with Albanese’s uninspiring Referendum can be far from racist, querying immigration policy is not querying migrants themselves.
The sins of over-committed simplification, hyperbole, sloganising, indignation, and disparagement have multiple causes.
Newspapers have long resorted to often ingenious, attention-grabbing headlines, with qualifications buried beneath. More and more, advertisers and influencers use half-truths to compete for “likes” and “going viral”. On top of that, competing political factions get shoutier.
Beyond increasing political rancour lies a major shift in capitalism, which is the topic of my next Meals Matter post, Doomed to disruption. We’ve farewelled the neoliberal era. Welcome to the age of disruption!
Meals Matter 