(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
I’ve been thinking tonight about the accumulating and apparently accelerating cycle of social crises and conflicts of the past several years. Specifically I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the rightist “Tea Party” movement, which may have reached its high-water mark with the nomination of Rand Paul as the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky. Most notable to me is the stridently pro-corporate, pro-business nature of Paul’s rhetoric. This exposes to some degree the contradiction between the rightist nature of the Tea Party, and the string of corporate abuses that have provided much of the social discontent on which the Teabaggers have sought to advance.
This is also the first, tentative and provisional, step in my long contemplated effort to develop a larger social and ideological critique of the current social crisis, both in the US and globally. I’m sure I’ll backtrack, reassess, recorrect some good portion of this and what will follow, but for the first time I feel at least sufficiently confident of my understanding to begin putting words on paper, or on electron as the case may be.
Social upheavals take interesting twists and turns:
constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible
The seeds of the context we’re dealing with were laid down in some cases as far back as the 70s. The crisis that they have created has started to break through sporadically into public consciousness over the past several years, punctuated by events such as the invasion of Iraq, Katrina, the bank bailout, Oilpocalypse Now. Each of these has spawned an increased disaffection with the system.
However, a citizenry deliberately kept ignorant in terms of political philosophy and ideological critique can only respond in an ad hoc fashion, or at least can only do so at first as it learns by experience what it has been denied by means of education and communications media. Combine that with a ruling system in which distraction and manipulation have been raised to a high art, and in which the clarion voices opposing hegemony are entirely silenced, and the social reaction to the growing cracks will frequently be misguided at best, monstrously destructive and self-destructive at worst.
But the crisis will not alleviate, the patchwork palliatives of establishment “reformers” are ever-weaker tea in a growing crisis. Social conflicts will reiterate and reverberate. Growing numbers will gain insight by experience. As those numbers grow, the possibilities for the formation of connections among them will multiply exponentially, information sharing and understanding will proliferate, the ability of the elite to manipulate will erode.
Call the Tea Party one of those early, manipulative, misguided outbursts. There will of course always be a bastion of hard-right authoritarian reactionary sentiment. This wouldn’t be the USA without it. But the Tea Party will eventually through those rightist allegiances glue itself to the corporate hegemony that underlies most of the social conflict. As that becomes obvious, they will wither to that narrow authoritarian base and their corporate logistical structure. The people will move on toward modes of resistance that challenge, not reinforce, the repressive and exploitative social structures creating the conflicts.
That’s the point at which the true hard work and the genuine conflict begins. For the outstanding question today is whether broad sections of the citizenry can actually assemble the political, cultural and psychic fortitude to engage in direct struggle with a deeply entrenched hegemonic elite, one with technology of surveillance and suppression far exceeding that ever available to rulers aforehand, and even more critically, ownership of a system which has mastered the techniques of distraction disinformation and division.
Some not irrelevant readings:
The Coming Insurrection
The XVIII Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
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I am not so optimistic.
I am afraid that the job of the corporate media has been to confuse and disinform our society so that making heads or tails of any given situation becomes impossible.
Competing facts, dueling narratives and the division and purposeful ignorance manufactured by the corporate media is making reality very fungible.
On the other side of this constantly shifting reality is the very concrete reality of Home and Garden infomercials, the “History” channel, TLC, ESPN and the like.
These are strong and safe topics that people can gather around and chat about at the water cooler.
The rest of reality is not safe and it’s not constant therefore it is not talked about – it’s not safe.
peace!
Americans are not ready to face-up to anything. There will be and cannot be any revolution from the bottom. Any revolution in this society has to come from the elites. That’s where the struggle is at the moment. The “people” are so easily manipulated that they really barely count.
As for the Tea Party movement–it is so dominated by militant ignorance and stupidity that it can only further whatever forces are manipulating it.
Ron Paul is the only leader associated with that movement who has a defensible position–but he is clearly a right-wing anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. The right will have to argue that one out–right now virtual fascism is the official credo of the majority of the Republican Party. Military adventures abroad, prisons for the poor, and forced religion for the rest. That this “movement” holds together such disparate forces is not a miracle of compromise but, rather, a miracle in militant stupidity–I think they just ignore their divisions or just can’t remember. Tea Party movement will come to nothing other than be yet another destructive force in our society.
That’s the essential part of understanding the Tea Party movement. It is based on the deliberate mis-education of the American public in public schools and in the media.
I think the right has done some good work in de-mystifying the “objective” nature of journalism. American journalism is anything but objective. This fiction has kept the American intelligencia in a state of virtual isolation internationally and is part of the cause of the extreme poverty of leftist thought in the U.S. There’s virtually no left viewpoint in any mainstream media (Maddow is an ambiguous voice–but she does not represent leftist thought). For example, liberals in America have virtually ignored the one of the most important and magisterial voices in political thought which is Noam Chomsky (though I disagree with him on numerous issues he is important and all arguments about American politics have to start with his critique). This oversight has made American political discourse hollow on the left and thus the only real dynamic thought occurs on the right, particularly the neoconservative thinkers–but they are all by themselves they have no one to spar with on an intellectual level since liberals and traditional progressives ignore Chomsky and find him more repulsive than Leo Strauss.
The right does not pretend that mainstream journalism is objective–in fact the obvious bias at Fox makes their claims of objectivity a kind of inside joke. Journalism can never be objective! What a con the MSM has pulled! It’s like the claims there can be a perpetual motion machine. Any reasonably educated person in the philosophy of science would understand that there is no possible way for journalism to be objective.
It is on the right where the action is. There is nothing and I mean nothing happening on the left. We need to understand why that is and should be our own personal project to delve into that.
Well at least Paul is honest. The rest of them merely lie, and then we get corporate crap government anyway.
Don’t know where this trend is going to come from — rather, it seems to me that the election of Obama signals a dramatic increase in the ability of the elite to manipulate the rest of us. Seen any viable third parties lately?