Wednesday, 30 August 2017

Talk of Class Warfare

People say outrageously bizarre and stupid things sometimes. A couple of months ago Stephen Miller accused the media of having a "cosmopolitan bias". When I heard this, I simply couldn't understand what he was trying to say. The word "cosmopolitan" literally means "familiar with and at ease in many different countries and cultures". 'Cosmopolitan bias' seems to me an oxymoron or contradiction-in-terms. How can someone have a 'cosmopolitan bias'? Surely to be cosmopolitan is by definition to be unbiased? It perplexed me so much I even looked up an article in Politico about the phrase, an article that argued that this term has an ugly history in Russia and in Eastern Europe. I wondered though: has the term 'cosmopolitan bias' ever been used at all in English-speaking countries? Miller's employment of this expression isn't evil, it's stupid. Ironically he used it in a press conference in which he was promoting Trump's policy of only admitting English speaking immigrants – ironic because it seems to me that he can't speak English himself.

I felt another sense of disconnect or unreality in the wake of the Charlottesville riots when I saw on TV clips of neo-nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us!" Again, I simply couldn't understand what they were trying to say. I had a vision of something like The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in which Jews take over the bodies of poor white trailer trash. I think now that what they were trying to say is that the US is presently and rightfully ruled by WASPS and that they don't want it taken over by Jews. There are two reasons why this chant confused me. First, the white supremacists were, as I said, poor white trash, not senators or congressmen or billionaire Republican sponsors. They don't currently own the country, they aren't the ruling class. Second, there are already plenty of Jews in the elite already, on both the Left and the Right, in the entertainment industry, in business – and in the Trump administration itself. This is not I should say to posit a Jewish conspiracy, it's simply to state facts.

Another problem with the white supremacist movement is with the word 'white' itself. What does 'white' even mean? Does the term designate only those descended from the English? From the Germans? In 1900, the Irish weren't considered white and today they are. Arguably Ashkenazi Jews are white, although they often don't identify as such. As I said in a previous post, I concede provacatively, you could argue that white supremacist movements are the bastard children of identity politics.

A huge chunk of the American electorate suffers from what Marx called 'false consciousness'. The white working class privilege their colour over their class. This insanity, in which the poor identify with the rich, is a massive part of the problem with modern America – the Republican Party has bamboozled the lower classes into supporting a corrupt wealthy few. Everyone in America seems to think he or she is going to be a millionaire one day. A second part of the problem with modern America relates to Evangelical Christians, who tend to support the Republicans. The Christian Right is so hypocritical, the religion has become a parody of what it once was. The Prosperity Gospel, for instance, holds that the rich are rich because God wants them to be rich and that if one prays to God sincerely enough, one will be rewarded with fame or money; climate change can't be happening because God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent and He wouldn't allow it. The status-quo is part of God's plan. These Evangelicals cling to Trump, continue to pretend he's a Christian even though, as the Pope rightly pointed out, he isn't, almost seem to accord him magical powers that will somehow miraculously improve their lives (so long as Washington 'insiders' can be conquered or at leat bypassed). Now, I don't think Trump is exactly 'racist' but I do think him a narcissistic confidence trickster whose whole raison d'ĂȘtre is to be followed and praised by his base and by Fox News, and will say anything he thinks will make his followers like him. I certainly don't think he's a Christian.

Christianity, as it was originally conceived, was the religion of the poor and oppressed. It was a movement for political change; it was left-wing. This has not been the case in the US for decades. What has happened in the States is that a religion once dedicated to love and helping the poor has been captured by hate, by hypocrisy, by the powerful.

If there is insanity and stupidity on the Right, there is also irrationality on the Left and I need to mention this as well. Yesterday I read a front-page article in my daily newspaper reporting a study that purported to show that in New Zealand approximately eighty percent of the pay disparity between men and women could be attributed to 'sexism'. Now, I may be wrong but something ineffable about this article struck me as bogus.  'Sexism' is a simple word for a complicated concept, something hard to identify and even harder to quantify. The article didn't explain the study's methodology, a study which perhaps oversimplified a picture that is probably far too complex to sum up in a single word. It overlooked the fact that maybe the top 1% of the wealthiest people in New Zealand are all men, probably all with trophy wives; 'sexism' seems an inappropriate word for this. The intuition that something about this study was bogus is a feeling I get from a lot of social theory, a lot of official and academic discourse. So much of social science is suspect. It has been argued by John Cranshaw for instance that because there is a correlation between alcohol abuse and youth suicide, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide. Surely alcohol abuse and youth suicide are both effects of something temporally and environmentally antecedent? Ideas like these, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide or that the pay disparity between men and women is simply the result of 'sexism' (whatever that means) float out of academia and government departments and simply get reported uncritically. I read a poem once with the line, "Reification won't get you out of the parking lot" and this sentiment applies here. Sometimes I feel issues like the ones I mentioned are raised by the media simply to distract attention from the real issues, such as the concentration of money and power in the hands of a very small few.

What I'm getting at here, perhaps indirectly, is that the Left, here in New Zealand and in America, has a problem with propagandist political correctness and with an uncritical reliance on the social sciences.

This post started off about America and I'll get back to it now, even though I'm an outsider who is probably not entitled to lecture anyone at all about it. The American Left needs to change. It needs to focus on social class, not group allegiances. For one thing it needs to bring in Christians, good Christians who value honesty and fairness. Christianity needs to change as well and it is changing a little – Pope Francis seems to me a very good man and the Anglican Church in Scotland a couple of months ago altered doctrinal law to permit gay marriage. The challenge the American Left faces is how to bring Protestant Christians in under the Democrat umbrella while still including the various other groups that make up the liberal Left: atheists like Bill Maher, Catholics like Stephen Colbert, Muslims like Hasan Minaj, Buddhists, Scientologists, Jews like Sarah Silverman and Lewis Black. This of course has been the problem for a while now – but one way to unite people of different colours and creeds is to find a position that everyone can agree on, the pursuit of social justice and truth, and to face up to the common enemy, the unscrupulously wealthy, the powerful who misuse their power, the dishonest. Barack Obama when in office was reluctant to talk about 'income inequality' because he was afraid people in the media, particularly the rightwing media, would immediately accuse him of trying to incite 'class warfare', but maybe a little class warfare is precisely what the Left should embrace. The rich should be taxed more, not less. There is a related problem with respect to attempting to bring Protestant Christians into the Democrat fold: how to represent Christians who have a problem with homosexuality and still also represent openly gay men and women. It is a problem that would never have occurred if psychiatrists and psychologists hadn't invented homosexuality in first place.

Although I have said the Left needs to bring in Christians I myself am not exactly a Christian. I have sometimes thought God might be evil. In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus says "God is a shout in the street"; I think God might be what other people think. Sometimes I identify as a Gnostic. During my life people have sometimes mistaken me for something I'm not and on several occasions I myself have even been mistaken for Jewish. I am not denying that racism and sexism exist, but perhaps everyone contains a little of everyone else.

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