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American Anarchy

Jun 16, 2016 //
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Despite Bernie Sanders clinging desperately to his chances of nomination like the country itself depended upon him to be the only rational choice in an otherwise catch-22 election, I feel comfortable saying that the next American presidential election will be a catch-22 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton representing the downward spiral that is the American status quo, and Trump representing the harbinger of the end of days.

I don’t want to spend that much time covering why Trump is the absolute worst person imaginable. He thinks building a giant concrete wall is somehow financially feasible or that the president has that kind of bullying power over another country. He thinks censoring the press is something reasonable to do within a democracy. He disparages women with superficial insults, and thinks that Hitler had the right idea when it came to handling an ideology that differed from his own. Honestly I feel stupid for even writing this out because if you haven’t figured out that Donald Trump is a terrible human being by now, then literally nothing I write is going to convince you. That being the case, moving right along.

However, Clinton’s status quo isn’t much better. The democratic party to which she is aligned, under Obama has deported more people than any previous president. For a political party to condemn Trump’s wall “solution” to illegal immigration, their own draconian practices really shouldn’t reflect the spirit of that wall. Obama also ordered ten times more drone strikes than President Bush, among them the assassination of an American citizen whose crime essentially amounted to hate speech. Closing down the torture prison for Muslims, despite being a campaign promise of 2008, also seems to have been forgotten eight God damn years later. What kind of hypocrisy is it to lambaste the bombastic xenophobia of one admittedly insane individual while grudgingly accepting it within the so-called progressive party of the United States?

That’s the democratic party though, not Clinton, so despite her being fully indoctrinated into its corporate culture, there’s still a chance she might distance herself from its less-than-illustrious past, right? Well, except she kinda voted in favour of that whole Iraq war thing, which greatly destabilized the region beyond its already pretty-much-fucked state of affairs, giving birth to everyone’s favourite terrorist group: ISIS. Clinton, in true politico fashion, prudently regrets the decision now that the whole world knows what a shitty idea it was. Of course, she would have known it then too, if she had actually read the information that was available at the time. This is what we want from a president: gross neglect when it comes to matters of global affairs. Like how she’s facing criminal charges for her mishandling of classified information by using her private, unsecured email server, despite multiple warnings to desist. People rightfully belittle Trump for his many business failures to contrast his claimed acumen, but Clinton’s facade of competency should face similar criticism.

At least she’s not clamouring to ban all Muslims! However, not being Hitler-esque in one’s policies is a really low bar. This article from Al Jazeera makes a compelling argument about the problem with the way Clinton frames the Islamic controversy. She forces Islam into a binary of radical Muslim terrorists on the one hand, and ‘good’ Muslim moderates on the other. This binary ignores the many facets that make up human beings, and resorts to defining Muslims solely in their relationship to terrorism. Within this framework, Islam is still incontrovertibly linked to terror, and it is only the measure of dedication that one has to their religion that denotes one’s likelihood of committing terrorist acts. Again, it’s not Hitler, but it’s not really ameliorating the situation either.

Clinton would also mark the very first woman president, meaning a victory for women akin to the one Obama’s election had for black communities: Pyrrhic. What are Clinton’s plans for low-income and part-time workers, the majority of whom are women? How does Clinton plan to help with child care? Having a female president does not accomplish much for feminism if most of the problems facing women are social and economic, and that president is corporatist in her politics.

So what are Americans to do? I originally wanted to sarcastically suggest voting for Trump, but now even joking about that makes me gag. I mean he’s to the left of Clinton on some issues, so he’s got that going for him, but he’s just as imbecilic about those policies as he is about his right wing beliefs. He advocates for local industry in lieu of global manufacturing which would greatly improve the domestic economy, yet produces all his own products in China. He wants to get corporate money out of politics, and brags about financing his own campaign, ignoring the fact that he himself is quite literally an anthropomorphic corporation. He’s even maintained some fairly progressive opinions during his political flip-flopping, and has come out both for and against gay marriage, which I guess you can call a draw. An article I read that I don’t care to find again because I don’t remember the source speculated that the danger with Trump wasn’t his radical ideology, but the uncertainty of which position he actually held on any given topic.

Chris Hedges in his book The Death of the Liberal Class says that voting for the “less worse” party (ie. the democrats) can only serve to push the acceptable political ideology further in that worse direction, and concessions to the right become a constant. Anyone left of Fox News only has the one option after all, so Americans end up with candidates like Clinton whose most admirable characteristic is that she is not Donald Trump, yet who is by no means a reasonable person to lead a country.

What do you do when the extent of your political influence as a citizen only allows you the choice between a neglectful criminal and a psychopath? Our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau very diplomatically said that he would work with whomever was elected, and that the Canadian/American relationship goes beyond the personalities of two individuals. This eloquently illustrates the common mentality of individuals in a contemporary democracy: accept the state of affairs for the sake of stability and maybe grumble about it privately at the water cooler. If either candidate is elected, Americans will very likely continue on with their lives, hoping that in four years their choices will be better. Yet my repeated analogy to Hitler is pertinent to this mentality: at what point is a society morally obligated to abandon traditional means of political change and opt for the non-traditional? Ought a society to continue to accept an escalating criminality in their leadership, trusting that the only potential for change is an increasingly meaningless democratic system?

Noam Chomsky’s theory is that people have forgotten other political processes in favour of blindly focusing on the carnival we call an election. To steal his line because he is much smarter than me and delightfully sarcastic, “Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world.” By retaining this focus as the only option for political participation, citizens do not even consider the activist route as a means of altering the course of their Hindenburg of a country. If the political system has failed, and it most certainly has, then it is up to the people to make the necessary changes to improve their country.

It is my understanding that citizen-based political reform outside of the incumbent structures of their system is called…

ANARCHY!

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Categories Politics

Intersectional Ideology

Apr 5, 2016 //
1

Intersectionality is a word that my Chrome browser does not recognize. It offers internationalism, intersection, and internationalization as potential replacements for my incompetent typo. Intersectionality is a word, however, and my competency levels are indeed high enough that I am in fact spelling it correctly. And, as a real word, intersectionality describes possibly one of the most critically important sociological aspects of the world today.

It is the notion that when differing identity markers (race, class, gender, etc.) intersect, they offer a distinct experience from the possession of a single marker. For example, a white woman will have a different experience of the world than an aboriginal woman. If society uses broad strokes to address its ills (in the form of feminism, say), then those broad strokes will address them from the perspective of the most dominant marker of that group (upper-middle class white women). This means that those who possess multiple markers are pretty much ignored by the mainstream, and progress is somewhat glacial for the more oppressed minorities.

However, there is a bit of a catch. Perhaps you are a homosexual, and are furious that I put in an etcetera before including sexual orientation in my list. I am also ableist and ageist in my exclusions. Markers can carry on ad infinitum, and our aboriginal woman from earlier may also derive divergent experiences based on her height, weight, the marital status of her parents, her own marital status, abuse she may or may not have suffered as a child, abuse she may or may not suffer now, her social status among her peers, and now I will throw in the etcetera. We also can’t ignore the individual attitudes each person will adopt in the face of their experiences, which in turn will alter the experience of… their… experiences. Right. Anyway, if we rely on intersectionality to address the unique experiences of intersecting markers, then ignoring any marker will result in a generalization that intersectionality was theorized to prevent in the first place.

Which is fine. We’re all special snowflakes. No biggie. My mom and dad have been telling me that since I was a kid without the use of words Chrome doesn’t understand. Intersectionality is about addressing oppression, however. That’s why when I said gender, I picked female instead of male. Since we’ve determined intersectionality essentially divides us into our own singular selves, then oppression must split along the identity marker variances, and form unique pockets of oppression in each individual.

How does one address this? It’s pretty simple to make policy to take care of women (even if, you know, we still don’t), but policy that is directed toward the oppression of the unique individual is preposterous. Even the commonly held vision of intersectionality that addresses the relatively broader trends in race, gender, class (sexual orientation, mental and physical health, age…) leaves much to be desired in creating practical specifics that can lead to more fruitful progressive policies outside of adding a plus sign when writing out LGBTQ+. We all desire uniqueness, and luckily we possess it, but when addressing social ills, demanding the recognition of our partitions as separate from all the others is not the solution. Conquerors don’t need to do the dividing if the people are doing it to themselves.

Intersectionality looks at oppression from the top down. It sees the unique oppressions felt by minority groups and correctly establishes them as distinct in the way that they intersect. We see the effects of oppression in all their unique glory, but what about the cause? If I, as the infamous straight, white, male, look down at all the people I’m oppressing, I can see that uniqueness. What do those unique experiences see when they look at me? What does it look like from the bottom up?

Anne Bishop offers an interestingly Marxist analysis: class is the measure of oppression against all of the oppressed. This makes sense, to some degree. Racial minorities and women are statistically poorer than their counterparts, so identifying class as the root cause of oppression is often regarded as true, but sadly it’s not. Communist countries the world over have proven that eliminating class does little to eliminate oppression. Incidentally, it’s easier to figure this out without analyzing world politics, as a trans individual being beaten to death clearly isn’t being oppressed by class.

Bishop does raise a good point, however: there is a whole being ignored if we focus solely on the individual processes of oppression. It’s just not class. It’s power. Communist countries divert power from the class structure into the political structure, and bullies exert their dominant power in the form of violence. The cause of oppression is a power imbalance, and limiting ourselves to its effects can only treat the symptoms while the disease rages on.

Does an intersectional ideology really distract from the root cause of oppression? Not inherently, but it certainly can. The idea of being an “ally” to an oppressed group means that sympathizers from outside of that group can only take a supportive secondary role rather than stand beside them as equals, thereby increasing the volume of the voice against greater inequality and oppression. It also seeks to enfranchise people into an already broken system. To go back to Marx, equality and equitable treatment of racial, gender, and sexual minorities in a system that necessitates oppression is not a success. It only further entrenches neoliberal ideology as the default.

Why would I start out by saying intersectionality is super important, and then write a whole bunch about how it’s divisive and counter-intuitive to solidarity? Well, mostly because it’s an accurate description of the way the world works. The language we use and the actions we take will always have an impact on the world around us, and possessing intersectional awareness will greatly improve our approach in those areas. We can’t ignore its truth, but we also can’t ignore the singular root that is responsible for the problems intersectionality identifies.

 

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism

Donald Trump: Man of the People

Mar 13, 2016 //
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Regardless of whether you think he’s the only legitimate use of Godwin’s law, Donald Trump’s success has turned politics into the real-life circus that newspaper cartoonists have been prophetically satirizing for decades. I won’t bother explaining why Donald Trump is terrible. I figure if you’re a supporter of Trump and you’ve miraculously stumbled across this blog, your literacy levels would have prevented you from progressing past the word “legitimate”, and you have already given up reading. Thus it’s a safe bet we’re all in political agreement so far.

Where we might differ is that I don’t believe that Donald Trump is the failure of democracy, but the culmination of it. Plato in his Republic decries democracy as pandering to the masses, where the success of a leader is determined not by their ability to lead or their wisdom, but by their ability to appeal to the bulk of the people. Considering the Greeks invented the damn thing, it seems that even in its infancy democracy has borne the seed of the pupating Trump.

Donald Trump is unique among politicians in that he isn’t one. Trump is heralded as a man who brazenly speaks his mind among sleazy, lying politicians. Except Trump makes just as many false promises as those sleazy politicians and flip-flops on controversial topics depending on who he is speaking to. He is more overtly racist and misogynistic than his peers, but surely that can’t be his method of success.

Donald Trump is not a politician, but a salesman, and in a political system that inherently relies on image over substance, we see how his popularity is not an anomaly but is almost predestined by our adherence to it. And Trump is an amazing salesman. A linguist analyzed Trump’s response to a simple question, and found that he uses repetition, punchy, simplistic language, and a speaking style that subconsciously elicits agreement. Again, there is little of substance in what he says, but the way he says it manipulatively charms those who aren’t paying attention.

We live in an age where advertising has the finest tools of psychology behind it. I mean, ads directed to kids have so much psychological juju that they can sell cereal that is just a few grams away from being bowls of actual sugar under the guise of being a nutritionally healthy choice. Trump knows all these tricks; how else could it be explained that several bankruptcies, a grocery list of failed business plans, and pending lawsuits don’t dissuade people from associating the name Trump with success? John Oliver dedicated an entire segment to showcasing this phenomenon, and he concluded that the brand is so well marketed that disassociating Donald from the name Trump is the optimal solution since convincing people to rebel against their advertorial mind-control is a depressingly futile endeavour.

One might argue that the stupidification of the American public is more to blame than the problems inherent to the democratic system, and this is a fair point. A nation full of well-educated, critical thinking individuals would more than likely vote for someone better qualified than Trump. Though, a nation full of baboons would vote for someone better qualified than Trump, so maybe it’s a moot point. In any case, America exists in political and economic systems that profit from the pliability of its populace, and so dedicates its efforts to enforcing that attribute. As Plato predicts, any system existing under a democracy will eventually develop into one where someone like Trump will flourish.

In a bid to overthrow the democratic system, Republicans are actually contemplating blocking Trump’s nomination if he wins. Thwarting the will of the populace may become the last resort of a political party desperately clinging to shreds of sanity. And they are not alone. Isaac Asimov is floating around the internet as a bonafide meme, declaring that “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” This notion that intelligence or sanity supersedes another’s right to vote is thoroughly undemocratic, and suggests some kind of neo-aristocracy to rule over the vulgar masses.

Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” In the West, we started with democracy, and after a few affairs with some monarchies, theocracies, and the odd dictatorial despot, we decided to stick with it. Now we seem to be reaping what we’ve sewn. Trump would never be able to attain power in any other form of government outside of a democracy.

So now we are faced with a question: do we continue with Churchill’s worst form of government and just desperately hope that when the inevitable Trumps appear on the ballot that our nations have not reach Idiocratic levels of docility, or do we dream up a better way?

 

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Categories Politics
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