Eruditorum Press

Crash log of the Singularity

politics

The Trump Trap

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The GOP, MAGA, the past, and the future…

Trump might leave the US as a three party system.  America would have three parties - a centrist liberal party, a far-right party, and a fascist party. 

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The classic pattern of a fascist takeover of government goes something like this…

The fascist party grows to the point where it is big enough to be a kind of kingmaker in a deadlocked representative democratic system, and the conservative elites of that system, threatened by chaos and/or growing left political feeling and workers’ struggle, adopt the fascists as the (to them) lesser evil, and help them into power.  The conservative elites expect to be able to control the fascists and use them as a bulwark, discarding them when they have outlived their usefulness, only to find that the fascist party out-manoeuvres them and assimilates or ejects them.  This has not yet happened in the United States, but it seems to have happened – on a micro level, as it were – within the Republican Party.  

The MAGA conquest of the Republican Party may not be absolutely complete, however.  MAGA might still split away.  

A lot depends on whether Trump once again secures the Republican nomination.

Front-runners don’t necessarily get nominations.  Many people now considered political jokes have, at one time or another, been front-runners.  Donald Trump isn’t even always the front-runner in the polls these days.  Even so, the likelihood is that, all else being equal, he will get the Republican nomination again.  

The movers-and-shakers within the GOP want rid of him.  So do most of the mid-level people.  They talk openly about how he was great but it’s not 2016 anymore, we need someone new, etc.  They are hoping to nudge the feeling in the party.  But the feeling in the party stays with Trump.  The insiders are reduced, as some of them have recently confessed, to waiting for Trump to die.

We all know the paradox.  We saw it played out in instance after instance in the midterms.  Republican hopefuls can’t be candidates without Trump’s approval; Republican candidates can’t get elected by the public with Trump’s approval.  This paradox runs right the way through the Republican Party, from top to bottom.  It is soon to be enacted on the national stage in the 2024 presidential election.

This is the trap the present-day Republican Party is in.  A trap entirely of its own creation and long in the making. 

I’ll have to go back a bit.

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Neoliberalism, ‘Creeping Fascism’, and The Cosby Show

In the late twentieth century, the post-war ‘long boom’ crumbled as a result of the secular tendency towards decline in the profit rate, which is – as Marx showed – innate to capitalism.  By the 1970s, even the vast and ongoing government stimulus of Cold War arms spending was failing to pump up the burst tyre.  The neoliberal strategy was an attempt by capitalism – unsuccessful in overall, real terms – to restore the profit rate, and the GOP was at the forefront of it with Reaganism, as were the British Tories with Thatcherism.  

The neoliberal revolution was not just economic.  It was also – in an almost too on-the-nose demonstration of Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ model – political and cultural. …

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Literally a Communist

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“I’m a communist you idiot!” declared Ash Sarkar on Good Morning Britain, in response to the heckling and strawmanning of Piers Morgan. (Video here.)  She’s subsequently been all over the media.  Morgan has accidentally made this into her ‘moment’.  As she herself humourously overstates, he’s even accidentally rehabilitated communism.  Turns out, if it’s communism or Piers Morgan, the British people seem more likely to give communism a try. 

Sarkar, senior editor at Novara Media, was being interviewed as a representative of the anti-Trump protestors descending on London (despite Trump’s well-advised absence from that city). As it happens, I suspect very few of the 100,000-250,000 who assembled were communists – despite the Daily Mail‘s characterisation of the protest as consisting of what they rather confusingly called a “rent-a-leftie mob”. 

(I’m wondering if there’s any money in lefty-rental.  Can I hire myself out?  And who does the renting?  George Soros?  The Mail seems to imply it’s Corbyn… but isn’t he one himself?  Shouldn’t he be on the books rather than keeping them?  Could I start my own franchise?  “Ah, so you’re a socialist but you make money from lefty-rental?  Hmm… interesting.”)

Morgan is one of those puzzling people who continue to enjoy a high profile in Britain despite the fact that almost everyone in Britain hates their guts.  Alongside other such specimens – Tony Blair, for instance – Morgan is one most disliked people in Britain, capable of provoking scorn from even his ideological kindred.  He’s a nasty lout who – as Editor of the Daily Mirror – apparently presided over endemic illegal telephone hacking.  (The subsequent Leveson inquiry found his denials “unpersuasive”.)  He’s so repellent, so self-evidently cynical and foolish, that not even his posh(ish) British accent was able to make anyone in America take him seriously.  He doesn’t come off looking significantly preferable to his interview subjects even when they’re Alex Jones (he did at least manage to be broadly on the right side of that ‘debate’) or Donald Trump himself.  (To give you some idea of Morgan’s technique: in one interview he asked Trump if he was a feminist.)  Sat opposite Ash Sarkar – whom he talked-over, patronised, misrepresented, and unrelentingly attempted to shout-down – he looked possibly more asinine than ever before in his misbegotten life, which is quite an achievement when one contemplates the sheer levels of misbegottonness involved in that life.  It was like watching a petulant toddler throwing a tantrum because his increasingly exasperated babysitter wouldn’t let him have a fifth funsize Mars bar.  It was only appropriate that he should try to strawman her.  What else has a man of straw got?

Morgan has seemed, in recent months, to be trying to make a new career out of Trump-sycophancy.  He has recently been castigating London mayor Sadiq Khan (a favorite target of Trump’s, and of Trump’s online constituency, for depressingly non-mysterious reasons) for permitting the infamous Trump-baby balloon.  We won’t get into that, except to note that Morgan (whining on Twitter) genuinely didn’t seem to understand that there was a particular reason for portraying Trump as a baby, namely Trump’s characteristic infantilism. …

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Hung Over

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So, interesting times, huh. 

Actually, incredible times.

The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn fights the Tories to a hung parliament after years in the wilderness.  Go back in time and tell me that in early 2015 and I’d laugh in your face.  Not because I ever had anything but respect for Corbyn.  I’ve always considered him a man of seriousness, principle, and dedication.  And not becaue I think left-wing policies (or what passes for them these days) can’t sway people, can’t be popular, can’t win elections.  They can, and do. 

(The truth is that, spread out across Labour, the SNP, Plaid Cymru – and taking into account the many people who vote LibDem for left-liberal reasons, and the many more people who abstain because they’re too left-wing to feel represented by any party, even if they themselves don’t necessarily understand themselves that way – the majority of the British public are to the left to some degree.  As Milton Friedman once bewailed, the public are irretrievably collectivist.)

No, I’d have laughed primarily because I would never have thought Corbyn would be able to get the nominations to stand for the leadership; and then I’d never have believed that the incurably cowardly and centrist Labour Party would elect him.  But he got those nominations – essentially because of a prank – and then the Labour membership stepped up.  Moreover, the people who had either been alienated from the party, or never attracted to it in the first place, owing to the poisonous legacy of Blairism, began flooding to join. 

Initially, the Corbyn group showed serious lapses of judgement and competence.  Many of these were probably inevitable when people with no experience of party leadership started trying to lead a party in adverse circumstances… but, it must be said, many others were avoidable and unforced. 

Even so, the main drag factors causing Corbyn’s persistently low polling and approval numbers in the pre-election period were the systematic media bias against him (across the spectrum from the hard right tabloids to the BBC to the supposedly left-wing Guardian, they either left what he said unreported or misrepresented him, often to the point of simple and outright fabrication) and the resistance from inside his own Parliamentary Party.  The comical palace coup failed to unseat Corbyn, as we know.  And there we saw a first real glimpse of the man’s grit, as he faced down not only a jeering David Cameron but a hefty chunk of his own party (his PLP being largely a bunch of centrists at best), going on to win a second leadership election with an increased majority.

Even so, most commentators expected – along with Theresa May, clearly – that Corbyn would lead the low-polling Labour Party over the cliff and into oblivion in this election.  Such is the unassailability of the entrenched and religiously-believed dogma of the neoliberal normal.  So imagine their astonishment when Corbyn started closing the gap – spectacularly.  The one difference being that, in election season, any media with any desire to pretend impartiality are more or less obliged to give coverage to both sides. …

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Margaret on the Radio

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This is post is kindasorta both a Tricky Dicky and a Psychic Landscape entry. It doesn’t quite fit into either series, but should – hopefully – be read in the context of them.

 

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, so many people downloaded the song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ from iTunes that the BBC were seemingly forced into the position of having to play it on Radio 1, in line with their usual practice of giving airtime to songs that are currently in the charts.  (In the end they copped out and played a clip – of a song that’s under a minute long anyway – with an explanation.  I didn’t hear it but I’d stake internal organs on it involving use of the word ‘divisive’.)  This awkward situation for the BBC, very much not of their choosing, created what is called a ‘row’, or a ‘controversy’, or a ‘scandal’.  This is when the right-wing media, rather than report the facts with headlines like ‘Thousands Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Downloading…’, instead publish stories with headlines like ‘Outrage as BBC plans to Celebrate Baroness Thatcher’s Death by Playing…’.  The ‘outrage’ the paper is supposedly reporting is always illustrated with a few hysterical quotes from people the paper contacted to supply them with hysterical quotes.  For instance, the Telegraph contacted Cecil Parkinson, one of Thatcher’s erstwhile cabinet minions and staunchest loyalists.  Lord Parkinson proved a disappointingly philosophical commentator however, telling them – bizarrely – that Thatcher wouldn’t have cared because she’d have been too busy watching Songs of Praise.

For those of you who don’t know, Songs of Praise is the longest running television show in history.  It has been aired more-or-less weekly on Sunday afternoons on BBC1 since 1961, and features recordings of Sunday church services – from a different church each week – complete with lots of hymn singing, helpfully subtitled so the viewer can join in at home.   The show is notorious for depicting anomalously large congregations which fail to accurately reflect the reality of Christian worship attendance figures in the United Kingdom.  As such, it is also one of the most subversive television shows in history, albeit unwittingly, being a weekly demonstration of both the psychologically deranging effects of the spectacle, and an infallible index of some of the quintessential sins of the British middle classes: pride, vanity, hypocrisy, etc.

Lord Parkinson’s idea in saying what he supposedly did was, presumably, to emphasize both Mrs Thatcher’s admirable contempt for the opinions of the people of Britain, but also her Christian piety.  He didn’t bother to explain why watching a particular television programme would mean Mrs Thatcher wouldn’t find time to care about an unconnected issue.  As I recall, Mrs Thatcher was quite an efficient multi-tasker.  Also, based on the occasional instance of seeing Songs of Praise in my youth, I’d say that the show was singularly conducive to making the viewer think about other things… and in my day it was presented by ex-Goon Harry Seacombe, so there always seemed a muted possibility that the cloying air of respectable tweeness might at any moment be discarded in favour of an atavistic reversion to random gibbering and screeching. …

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In the Loop

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Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour Party, recently asked Seumas Milne to be his director of communications. Milne is one of the few journalists currently working in the British media who is genuinely worth reading. Milne, for instance, wrote The Enemy Within, which is not the novelisation of the 1996 TV movie (Gary Russell courageously tackled that one), but rather a rigorous investigative expose of the way the Tory government – with help from the ‘security services’ and the tabloid press – set about trying to covertly undermine, smear and frame the NUM and Arthur Scargill during the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.

Certainly, when you recall that David ‘Pigfucker’ Cameron’s choice for an equivalent post was Andy Coulson, you see evidence of a stark division – authentically based on a decency and honesty gap – opening up between the parties for the first time in quite a while.

Milne, however, is one of those Left-wing journos who has been repeatedly (and rightly) criticised by Media Lens for being less than brave about criticising the paper he writes for, even as he savages bias elsewhere. So he will already have ability to ruthlessly criticise other people for doing stuff that his own employers do too – something that will come in handy for the director of communications for a political party.  (Just so as you know, Phil – if you start supporting Western imperialism, I’mma call you on it, ‘kay?)

Milne’s appointment has been hysterically decried by the Right (well, obviously) and also by figures ostensibly on the Left in ostensibly Left-wing publications (I won’t link to any of this tripe – if you want to see some of it, just google ‘corbyn milne’ and it’ll be the first stuff you see).  Milne’s great crime is supposedly that he’s ‘an apologist for dictators and terrorists’, etc.  If you actually go past the gibbering rhetoric of the denunciations and look at the articles they link to, you find Milne objecting to the ridiculous, dangerous, and hypocritical way Vladimir Putin (of whom I am certainly no fan) is demonized, or trying to provide valuable historical context for terrorist attacks on the West, and turmoil in the Middle East, and having the bad taste to locate such context in the sordid history of Western ‘intervention’.  (The detractors link to these articles seemingly confident in the hope that you either won’t bother reading them, or that you’ll be wearing the same kind of ideological blinkers they do.)  I don’t agree with every syllable of what Milne writes, but to call him an apologist for terrorism is just dishonest; and the whingeing about his Oxbridge background is hypocrisy of the highest order coming from the British media and political elites. 

Relatedly, somebody asked me on Tumblr if I thought that Jeremy Corbyn has been so comprehensively smeared in the press that he is now useless against David Cameron. In other words: has a man who looks like Ben Kenobi (after resigning from the Jedi and becoming a Geography teacher) now been so traduced that he seems like a worse option than a man who lies like other people breathe, and whom most people seem to consider a plausible candidate for necrophiliac beastiality?…

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The Award of Cruelty

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Diversity and social justice issues were creeping into the Hugo Awards, or rather into the cultural artifacts they celebrate, as such issues creep into the culture generally.  It happens because people are getting more and more interested in them, more open to them, and caring more about them.  This is, by the way, the product of material struggles for recognition and equal rights by people who are marginalised by mainstream culture in the West (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, bourgeois-hegemonic culture).  It must be stressed that such claims are not only valid on their face but also are represented, in artistic terms, by valuable work that deserves recognition.

The Puppies saw this trend and it infuriated them.  Just as they are doubtless infuriated by any such progress, by the increasing volume of the voices they used to be able to talk over and down to with impunity, by the increasing – and increasingly recognised – validity of these voices, not only in themselves but in their abilities.  The Hugos are, the Puppies think, their turf, just as the rabble of GamerGate, and the constituency they pander to, imagine that video games are their turf.  They took the gradual changes occuring in an institution that has always reflected a seam of progressivism in SF/Fantasy (just as it has always reflected other seams) and blew the phenomenon up out of all proportion.  (Seriously, I wish their distorted view of Hugos, and culture generally, were really true, and the voices they hate and fear really were as ascendant as they fantasize them to be.)

They saw this smidge of progress and imagined that it constituted some kind of attack upon their freedom.  They imagined it, and believed it, having chosen to imagine and believe it… because it’s amazing how sincerely and passionately people can believe ridiculous things that further their interests, confirm their prejudices and pamper their privileges.  They did this because that’s what reactionaries always do.  It’s a classic maneuvre when you’re rallying around the defence of established privilege and entrenched power relations (which is what reactionary politics always is, at base): paint yourself as the victim.  It’s great camouflage.  And they love it too.  They love the smell of the victim paint on their bodies, drying on them, crusting and cracking, leaving a trail of victim flakes everywhere they go.  Conservatives and reactionaries and fascists and ressentimentalists are as fond of being the victim as the whingeing, entitled, self-pitying minorities that live in their imaginations.  (There is probably something psychological to be made of the right-wing love of victimhood, and the way they always portray themselves in much the same terms that they complain about in their confabulated enemies and hate-figures.  I remember how, at school, bullies would always howl “But he started it!” and “It wasn’t my fault!” when caught, and then pout self-pityingly at the injustice of being told not to bully.)

But yeah, they interpret the struggles of the marginalised and mocked, their demands for justice, as an attack.  Moderate demands. …

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46

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The committee want to know about Vorg and Shirna’s ‘ritual’. 

Shirna tries to explain.  “We’re entertainers.”  She does a little dance.  “Understand?”

Pletrac regards her, his face blank.

“No,” he says.

Vorg jumps in.

“Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse… nothing serious, nothing political.”

Who is he talking to?  The committee?  The BBC?  Us?

In any case, the commitee retire – scandalised – into secret session.

“Amusement is prohibited,” gabbles Kailk in cold panic, “it’s purposeless.”

“Zarb is considering lifting that restriction,” says Pletrac.  Zarb is their leader.  “The latest thinking is that the latest outbreak of violence among the functionaries is caused by lack of amusement.”

The ‘functionaries’ are their slaves.  (Sadly, they are portrayed as rudimentary and stupid.)

The committee members are caught between two possible choices, both of them extremely attractive to any ruling class: stop the ‘functionaries’ thinking about anything but their function, or amuse the ‘functionaries’ and thus keep their mind off the fact that they are slaves.

So it turns out that amusement is pretty serious and political after all.

Meanwhile, inside Vorg’s silly, apolitical machine, white English imperialists complain about the idleness of the “madrasis”.

“Won’t have ’em on the plantation,” says Major Daley.…

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The Cut

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On ‘The Space Museum’

Recently, while tracking some hits this blog received, I discovered a new Doctor Who podcast called Pex Lives.  It’s great stuff, well worth listening to… and I’m not just saying that because the guys who make it – Kevin Burns and James Murphy – kindly linked to me and mentioned me in one of the episodes.  Their third and latest podcast is just out, and centres upon ‘The Krotons’.  Their second podcast is about ‘The Space Museum’ and they delve into the piece with lots of wit (in both senses of the word) alongside anarchism, Tolstoy, progress and political change.  Not many Who podcasts touch on stuff like this.  My favourite quote: “we’re both ambivalent about violent revolution”.  (For the record, so am I.)   It also helps that they both have likeable voices.  Kevin sounds like Terry Gilliam (i.e. he has one of those American voices that sounds as though it is filtered through a permanent grin of enthusiasm) and James sounds like a gigantic, sentient, wryly raised eyebrow that has somehow gained the ability to talk with the voice of a hip-hop DJ.  Even so, I kept on wanting to interrupt them… which I mean as a compliment.  So I made some notes instead, and they turned into this:

1. Freeze Frame

The Doctor, Vicki, Barbara and Ian spend episode one wandering around the museum unseen and unheard, unable to interact with events and apparently seeing glimpses of their own future, culminating in their encountering themselves as exhibits. The explanation for this is that they’ve “jumped a time track” and arrived before their arrival, so to speak. Vicki ponders what this means in a speech that, as the Pexcasters remark, is as poetic as it is scientifically meaningless:

Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, also has dimensions of its own.

However, I think that “time”, as used here, really refers to narrative, particularly TV narrative. One of those inner dimensions of narrative is, of course, metaphor. So when Vicki uses the word “time” metaphorically to refer to TV narrative (hereafter TVN), and thus says that narrative has dimensions of its own, she identifies one of those dimensions by using it.

But let’s look at the moment when the ‘time track’ is ‘jumped’. This happens at the very beginning of part one, which is also a reprise of the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Crusade’.  This cliffhanger was a sudden and uncanny ‘freezing’ of the characters.  The Doctor & Co. are still frozen in their medieval duds at the beginning of ‘Space Museum’.  They then unfreeze in their regular clothes (Ian in suave catalogue menswear, Vicki in teenybopper pop-socks, Barbara in her oh-so-practical cardigan, and the Doctor in his usual quasi-Edwardian proto-Adam Adamant gear). The Doctor, upon being questioned about this by the baffled Ian, says that the answer is “time and relativity, dear boy”.

This ‘jump’ occurs at the junction of two stories, one ending and the other starting.  At the start of the new TVN, the characters are still, so to speak, stuck at the end of the last TVN. …

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It Came From Uranus

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I finished reading Stephen Baxter’s Doctor Who novel The Wheel of Ice today.  The novel had its moments.  There is one description of an attack upon Zoe by a group of ‘blue dolls’ – fabricated avatars of an ancient artificial intelligence – that is rather well done.  The blank black eyes and needle teeth are fairly routine but there is something oddly disturbing about the descriptions of their paddle-like hands.

On the whole, however, I found the book rather uninspired.  The phrase I just used – “ancient artificial intelligence” – says a lot about the book’s use of somewhat familiar tropes.  There seems to have been an attempt to evoke the ‘base under siege’ / ‘humans in the future’ formula so often said to be typical of the Troughton era… but with the ‘siege’ coming from within the colony.  However, Baxter is perhaps a little too interested in the technical details of the solar system.  We get an awful lot of scenes where the action stops dead so the characters can explain neutrinos to each other, or describe the chemical composition of Titan’s atmosphere.  There’s also a lot of stuff about how a space colony would actuallly work in technical terms, but it’s not terribly relevant to the story.  So, once again, the action tends to pause so that people can talk about waste recycling.

There is an attempt to adapt the characters of Zoe and Jamie to new situations that also causes a slowing-down of the action.  It would be okay if they had genuinely interesting things to do… but Zoe gets to tell bedtime stories about the Karkus to a toddler and Jamie falls in with a bunch of naff ‘rebellious’ young people who say excrutiating things like “Cowabunga, granddad!”.  I shit you not.

There’s a rather likeable Scottish robot called Mac who gets developed only so far before being sidelined and then brought back for a rather twee ’emotional’ bit at the end.  It’s characteristic of the novel that this cathartic final scene for Mac is bordered by lots of technical talk involving him being sent to Uranus to mine tarranium (it came from Uranus, I knew it did!).  There are lots of continuity references in the book, if that’s the sort of thing that spreads your marmite.

The book also has a go at being political… and that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about.  There is a nasty corporation called, rather amusingly, Bootstrap… as thought it was set up by Norman Tebbit or someone like that.  The representative of the corporation is a nasty woman who is nasty because she’s nasty, and a woman because she’s a woman.  She does nasty things in a brusque, rude manner, because she’s nasty and brusque and rude.  Everybody else in the story seems to be well-meaning, if equally characterless.  Some are delineated by being Spanish or Welsh.  The rest blur into one indistinct melange even as you read.  (So quite like a mid-Troughton space base story in fact!) …

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