The Season

I want to mock this (from John Cole), but it was once a position I shared more closely:

"I do, however, want to state again, that I find the almost celebratory reactions by Americans on twitter to be odd. Not to be an old fart, but the fear of the unknown is just too much right now. While I’m all in favor of people being able to democratically choose their own future, I’m also cognizant that a lot of these people might choose to go with leadership that will make life very difficult for the United States. Like I said before, free societies mean societies that are free to hate us."

His initial point is not invalid. Fear of the unknown will drive "middle class" reactions to waves of protest, uprising and revolution - both domestic and foreign -  because those people who consciously identify as "middle class" are more often than not deeply conservative. I don't mean to imply that they don't self-identify as social democrats, liberals, labour or progressives. Many of them probably do. But, their self-positioning in the middle of a consciously admitted class structure, often after extended education in a professional or skilled career and with all of the accompanying socialization, speaks to an acceptance of an order of society which (a) has classes and (b) has them working to belong to the economically more independent managerial and middle tiers which nonetheless and ironically depend rather fundamentally on an entire class existing in relative and actual poverty beneath them, as a defining limit to their own comparative affluence.

In other words, they have an investment in the way of things.

The "Tea Party" reveals perhaps one manifestation of this reaction to systemic change, especially insomuch as the average Tea Partier possesses greater wealth than most Americans, and certainly than most people who have the misfortune to live elsewhere atop resources rich people want. That the Tea Party is xenophobic, border obsessed, anti-immigrant, and prone to grossly if unconsciously racialist characterizations of Black and Hispanic Americans should come as no surprise. That its members lionize strong political and religious women while backing the most aggressive legal and judicial attacks on the autonomy of women in at least a generation should also come as no real shock. The American middle class has a deliberate shape, one cultivated by tax law, religious propaganda, politicking, media, entertainment and rent/lending practices - and that shape is functionally Anglo-European*, familial and nativist.

I don't know as much about the BNP and its analogs in France and Germany, but a cursory reading of their place in their own contexts seems to mirror that of the Tea Party and other xenophobic and nativist groups stateside.

But, professional liberals depend also on the maintenance of this order in which we find ourselves, because they too identify consciously as members of the much lauded "middle class." As noted over the last several months, liberals will embrace an expansion of social tolerances with greater alacrity than their nativist counterparts, but that appears to provide the relative limit to their revolutionary and reformist potential.

Because a liberal is not a reformist or a revolutionary. He or she is in fact someone who accepts and/or believes in the validity of his or her class, and the place occupied in the scheme of things. Liberals may not have nativist tendencies, or at least as overtly so as their more consciously conservative counterparts - but they do identify with their own wealth, education, institutions and merit certificates in a way which marks them, to even a casual observer, as invested members of the capitalist project.

Like their nativist counterparts, liberals have begun to look for causes and symptoms of a social decay they can perceive, but cannot properly identify.** Unlike the nativists, they find their bête noire not in foreigners, blacks or non-familial women, exactly - but in the "corruption" of once trusted institutions. The liberal does not want to abolish those institutions; institutions which enforce class, which define property, which confirm their merit, which punish transgressors. The liberal wants to restore them.

Similar to the nativist who wants to restore a mythical golden age of national and religious purity, the liberal wants to restore mythical institutions of justice and merit.

And both projects, we should understand, reflect a conservative impulse so entrenched in membership within the capitalist "middle class," and in the encompassing and reinforcing identities of that class, that any perceived or existential threat to it will likely force a series of rubicon crossing events which place all members of the managerial middle class in opposition to the poor, the oppressed, the alien and the underclasses, whether or not both wider camps continue to fight each other for control of the emerging milice rump state which even now takes on a clear shape in the "anti-terror" apparatus which consumes more and more of the tax receipts of various Western governments; a leaner, more efficient state, stripped of its cumbersome welfare functions, to better serve transnational capital during the period of flux which will shatter norms and Westphalia over the next decades.

Cole, of course, does not necessarily outline or identify these factors. He doesn't need to. Instead he uses a rote, casual and I daresay even instinctive short-hand, when he writes:

"I’m also cognizant that a lot of these people might choose to go with leadership that will make life very difficult for the United States. Like I said before, free societies mean societies that are free to hate us."

John Cole, uniquely a good liberal and a recovering nativist, does not have to spell out his identities. His is no voice-over commentary. It's implicit, a part of the dialogue itself. For Cole - as with both the institutional liberals and the nativist reactionaries - the "United States" which is perhaps already threatened by revolution and unrest is also "us."

And he means it - as I think do most liberals and nativists  - when he says that he believes that unrest and social collapse threaten that conscious "us."

Because it does.

And we whose very existences threaten it should take note. And take notes. Because when push comes to shove, and it will come to shove, they are going to push back like fully invested, co-opted, threatened people. And they already live rather comfortably not only with the reality of prisons, endless wars and pacification - but with the ideas of them...



*  - the old, first Republic Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic ideal has of course been expanded as waves of Poles, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Jews and other Europeans have been incorporated into the urban (and later, suburban) body politic by law and industry - usually as a counterweight to blackness and actual black people, but also as a buffer against poor and rural whites. We should also note that the liberal sense of triumph over prejudice, paranoia and narrowness is in fact a confirmation of the basically exclusionary form of the middle class. Whereas the liberal identifies as a member of that class by seeking to return it to a largely fictional ideal of universal brotherhood and merit, the nativist more correctly identifies it as, well, native.

** - this is a willfully broad statement as I have neither the time nor inclination to write out the five or ten pages necessary to make this point in finer detail...