What, precisely, is the broader significance of the US government shutdown? Is this just an unfortunate side effect of contingent political developments (Republican gerrymandering) which have temporarily magnified the power of a ultimately marginal elements in the society (a racist backlash against the Obama Presidency), something the system will ultimately correct, allowing us to get on with life as usual? Or does it reflect a deeper structural, civilizational, or even spiritual disorder \u2013a new stage in our slow motion, protracted spiral into civilizational crisis?<\/p>\n
Clearly some elements of the crisis \u2013its specific contours, for example\u2014are contingent and conjunctural. In a system which already systematically over-represents rural areas, the South, and the West, the 2010 redistricting took place at a time when Republicans controlled a number of critical state legislatures and thus redrew district lines to the disadvantage of the Democrats. And the Republican Party nationally has, to an extent which has caught its leaders by surprise, become the captive of the opportunistic political strategy it has pursued since 1968: appealing to racism and the sense of being \u201cleft behind\u201d to combat what it portrays, improbably, as \u201celitist\u201d progressive economic, social, and cultural policy.<\/p>\n
But the real question is why this strategy has proven so effective and so resilient? Why is there such a powerful constituency for what has become, in effect, an anticivilizational politics? In order to answer this question, we must look deeper, at the structural, civilizational, and spiritual levels.<\/p>\n
Let it be said, to begin with, the Tea Party is itself a complex and heterogeneous political formation. It brings together, at the ideological level, religious social conservatives, libertarians, and identarian (racialist) populists as well as many who embrace two or more of these ultimately incompatible ideologies.\u00a0 Socially, it has been funded by the most rapacious sectors of Capital, especially in the extractive sector (e.g. the Koch Brothers). It has drawn its support from a wide array of strata from displaced industrial workers to nouveau riche<\/em> elements, especially those in the \u201chigh earning but not rich yet\u201d or HENRY category. The interests of the most rapacious sectors of Capital are clear: i.e. to obstruct any and all regulation and\/or reallocation of surplus which might undercut their privileged position. The supporters<\/em> of the Tea Party, on the other hand, fall into three categories. There are those, who (mostly the HENRYs) who identify with the most rapacious sectors of Capital, believe that their success is due to their own efforts, and resent tax burdens which undercut their consumption aspirations, which are well out of line with any reasonable expectations.\u00a0 Then there are those who feel left behind in the information and technology economy and see the Democrats as the party of the infotech gentry \u2013and as redistributors of wealth from the Euro-American to African American and to a lesser extent Latino and immigrant working (they would say \u201cunder\u201d)classes. \u00a0Finally, there is a small but politically active and vocal group (actually the ideological<\/em> core of this heterogeneous Right) which is often university educated and in any case quite sophisticated but which has chosen to withdraw to one degree or another (though less than they imagine) from the \u201cgrid\u201d which they associate, for reasons which bear further analysis, with the State much more so than with Capital and the global market. \u00a0This latter group overlaps in some degree with the other two and serves as the de facto<\/em> cadre of the movement.<\/p>\n Behind the formation of this constituency lies the structural crisis of global capitalism and the gradual erosion of the privileged position of the United States, along with other \u201cadvanced\u201d economies with in the global market. Globalization and the information economy are, quite simply, not working for large and growing numbers of people. The rise of highly educated skilled working classes in India, China, and other emerging markets has eroded the monopoly rents on skill and innovation on which Western prosperity has been partly based, while the redeployment of more and more manufacturing to low wage regions has presented workers in the West with the impossible demand that they all become university-educated professionals. And then when they do, they still find their disposable incomes eroding, because more university educated professionals means lower monopoly rents for those who achieve this status.\u00a0 In other words, as the global \u201cmiddle class\u201d (misdefined as those who have significant disposable income) grows, the Western \u201cmiddle class\u201d declines. And even those who \u201csucceed\u201d in the new economy rarely do so at the levels they hoped for or expected. They never become independently wealth, able to live off of safe investments. <\/em>But more on this later \u2026<\/p>\n Accompanying this process is the final victory of the marketplace over all other institutions. This means the commodification of everything<\/em> and the proletarianization of essentially everybody<\/em> (even, as we have argued, highly privileged members of the new global elite, who must also serve Capital or starve).<\/p>\n Now not everyone who is affected by this crisis gravitates towards the Tea Party or other right-wing populist formations.\u00a0 But the crisis, in spite of being a crisis of capitalism <\/em>has not led to any renaissance of the revolutionary left. This is because, as the left learned to its chagrin in the 1920s and 1930s, class is not the only factor shaping political identity and political action. Class consciousness is mediated through ethnic and gender identities \u2013and ultimately ordered to civilizational ideals. Many, in fact, for whom capitalism in its various stages of development has not worked, have<\/em> opted for the left. But they have almost always done so through the medium of left wing populist linking ideologies which might loosely be grouped together as \u201canti-imperialisms\u201d or \u201cnational liberation movements.\u201d This is why the revolutionary left of the post WWII period understood itself as anti-American first (with America the symbol of global Capital at that stage in its development) more so than as socialist or communist, and why the people of postrevolutionary societies like Russia and China remain nationalistic and anti-American long after they have ceased to take socialism seriously.<\/p>\n And there are still many, even in the United States, perhaps a majority, who respond to the crisis in a way that is inflected to the left (if not so far as the Tea Party inflects to the right). But the left towards which their reaction is inflected is one allied (for good reason) with global Capital. Broadly speaking these fall into two groups: those who identify as members of ethnic minorities and those whose identities are cosmopolitan. \u00a0Those who are members of ethnic minorities find that even if globalization isn\u2019t really working for them, that it creates more opportunities than the protectionist, isolationist, identarian alternative which threatens to roll back decades of incomplete but still significant progress towards \u201cracial\u201d justice. \u00a0And the dominant globalist forces maintain support for their agenda by opening up opportunities for these sectors and addressing some of the most serious threats to their survival and livelihood (health care and immigration reform, for example). Cosmopolitans, similarly, even if they find themselves falling short of or even excluded from the new global elite, share an identity with that elite formed through a broadly liberal university education. And what cosmopolitans do <\/em>really wouldn\u2019t even exist in a \u201creset\u201d deglobalized economy. (That is also true for almost everyone else, but we will get to that later).<\/p>\n The people who tend to the right, towards the Tea Party, are those who carry a strong \u201cwhite\u201d identity. Like all ethnic identities this one is constructed \u2013in this case negatively as \u201cnot Black, not recent immigrant, not a liberally educated cosmopolitan.\u201d\u00a0 University educated people who share this identity tend either to have had an education which was overwhelmingly technical in character, and not liberal, or one which was intentionally not<\/em> globalizing and multicultural, i.e. one rooted in a conservative, usually religious interpretation of the \u201cWestern\u201d tradition.\u00a0 They feel like the globalists offer them very little. Even if they know<\/em>, for example that they will benefit from the Affordable Care Act, they find themselves in a world in which their skills and values are less and less in demand. They are the Left Behind. And they tend to feel this way even if they are actually quite privileged.\u00a0 They know that it is just a matter of time before someone in India or China finds a way to pirate what they invented or, even worse, actually come up with a better, cheaper way to do it. Their privilege, great though it may be at the moment, is very <\/em>fragile. And of course many displaced Euro-American industrial workers have no such privileges at all any longer.<\/p>\n This is, as one commentator I cannot identify pointed out, why they are willing to take the risk of global economic crisis by shutting down much of the US government and risking default. They want to hit the \u201creset\u201d button.<\/p>\n There is one identity which we have not yet mentioned in this discussion, but it is a very important one: gender. While there are clearly both men and women on both the left and the right, the gender gap is real and deep.\u00a0 The reasons for this are quite simple. Women have always been more aware of the ways in which we are all dependent on each other.\u00a0 And they are less likely to indulge fantasies of self-sufficiency in a post-apocalyptic world. So while there are certainly men who know that as much as the world seems to be working against them, in the absence of a viable civilizational <\/em>alternative, total collapse would be a VERY BAD thing, and a few women who imagine themselves as \u201cearth mothers\u201d raising food and children while their husbands hunt and defend the homestead, women, generally speaking, live closer to the truth.<\/p>\n The Tea Party is playing a dangerous game. And it is all the more dangerous because there are some small elements of truth in their perspective.\u00a0 Globalism isn\u2019t working.\u00a0 Socialism, at least as historically understood and practiced, is no longer an attractive alternative. We are all tired of being treated like batteries which is, ultimately, how Global Capital engages us and how Big Government makes us feel. We want to be human again.<\/p>\n But setting in motion another and deeper global economic crisis will accomplish nothing. No matter how bad, it is unlikely to actually provide the \u201creset\u201d the Tea Party radicals are looking for.\u00a0 And we really don\u2019t have any alternatives, Right or Left.\u00a0 It is not only the technogentry or cosmopolitan cultural workers whose very professions exist only in the context of the interdependent global system currently regulated by Capital and the market. Almost no one any longer does anything which is really possible \u201coff the grid.\u201d And we certainly do not have an alternative global leadership capable of leading a postrevolutionary society.\u00a0 If too serious a crisis threatens, the result will be a \u201csave\u201d on the part of what remains of the globalist elites which seriously damages what democratic public life and personal autonomy remain. Fascism also began as an attempt at a populist \u201creset.\u201d It ended as something very different and far, far worse.<\/p>\n In all likelihood the immediate crisis will pass, hopefully with a decisive defeat for the Tea Party and those Republicans who conciliated them.\u00a0 But the underlying forces which created this situation will persist. And people across all social strata and across the entire political-theological spectrum are likely to get more desperate and to act more and more rashly. We need to prepare for this.<\/p>\n What does this mean?<\/p>\n Partly it means that we need to be on guard. While historic fascism was, in many ways, a contingent product of very specific historical circumstances, \u201cfascistoid\u201d phenomena are, for the reasons we explained above, integral to capitalism and secularism in their phase of decline, and are thus a permanent danger.<\/p>\n But it also means doing the hard work of charting the next steps in the human spiritual and civilizational project. We must craft a new spiritual and civilizational ideal and cultivate leaders who can build institutions which can realize that ideal.\u00a0 And we need to help the people overcome the childish conviction that we can be independent. That doesn\u2019t mean we have to consent to being reduced to mere batteries, to proletarianization at the hands of the market or<\/em> the state. On the contrary, we should resist proletarianization with every fiber of our being. (It is Being Itself, in which we share, which resists!) But the human condition is one of finitude and contingency. It is a condition we transcend only when we recognize that we <\/em>are not this Self or this Ego, individual or collective, but a participation in something far greater and deeper, that we share in Being and live in each other\u2019s embrace. \u00a0Only when we realize this and stop demanding that the Saeculum <\/em>deliver what only a long and difficult spiritual journey can even begin to offer will we find a way forward, beyond the Saeculum<\/em>, towards a future in which we can (once again?), (at long last?), be human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What, precisely, is the broader significance of the US government shutdown? Is this just an unfortunate side effect of contingent political developments (Republican gerrymandering) which have temporarily magnified the power of a ultimately marginal elements in the society (a racist … Continue reading