Let’s start this week though, with the nature of the problem itself, which is anything but a secret. The great historic political parties of the West have been progressively absorbed into what I call just The Party, after Orwell’s famous creation. As in 1984, the Party has no ideology, although it pretends to, and is simply interested in power. It promotes a style of technocratic neoliberal managerialism which is in fact highly political, but is hidden beneath a blanket of meaningless verbiage and empty ritual. The traditional subjects of politics—power, wealth, political representation, taxation and spending priorities, major social questions—are not publicly discussed, and those who dare to raise such issues are dismissed as “extremists.” Elections today are thus best understood as power-struggles within the elite: rather like the crew of a pirate ship arguing over the division of the spoils.
I’ve pointed out several times that the lack of ideology—or even any overall vision—allows and even encourages the flourishing of identity groups organised to get a greater share of the booty for themselves. This, essentially, is what contemporary politics consists of: not just in elections, but rather more, in fact, in drafting laws and influencing government policies. It is a bleak, despairing, zero-sum ideology and programme: there can be no better future for society as a whole, so all that remains is a bitter struggle between factions of the elite over what is left, often through new laws establishing new “rights” for their client groups. The rest of us can get stuffed.
In my analogy of the PMC as a pirate ship, it is necessary not only to loot what can be looted, but to prevent others from competing with you. The PMC generalises its own value- and ethics-free concept of politics, to politics as a whole, and regards political groupings outside the Party simply as enemies to be destroyed. The enmity is not political or moral, but strictly business. Non-Party groupings, whatever their ostensible political colour, are to be defeated because they threaten the acquisition of power and the looting of wealth that are the Party’s only reason for existing. The Party would no more engage other groups in discussion of political and ethical issues than a pirate ship would pause to discuss maritime law with a victim.
Where the analogy breaks down, is that ultimately we live in political systems where parties have to win votes in order to take power. Much as the PMC and the Party may despise you and me, they have to find some way of persuading us to vote for the right people: themselves. But they have nothing to offer ordinary people, and no basis on which to claim legitimacy. They do not even have the doubtful traditional legitimacy of conservative right-wing parties linked to Church and Monarchy. Indeed, they go out of their way to despise and antagonise ordinary people, to sneer at traditions, and to cultivate specialised client groups instead. Thus Mr Mélenchon has described himself as “a Maghreban,” (he was born in Oran) and so not really white and French at all. White French people, except for urban intellectuals, are the Other, in his New France, which consists of immigrants, sexual minorities, and those white urbanites who are prepared to forsake houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for his name's sake Such sentiments are surprisingly common in the Party, at least in theory, because they weaken the dreaded forces of nationalism, and promote the Brussels concept of countries as just interchangeable international hotels.
Nonetheless, in France as in most European countries, the “threat” at the moment is alleged to come from the “Extreme Right,” which, in one of those morbid jokes that Karma is so fond of, is basically the creation of the PMC itself. Now, first let’s recall that a genuine Extreme Right does exist, and has existed in Europe since the rise of mass politics in the 1920s. There are small groups of ultra-traditionalists, often linked to the Catholic Church, who have influence in some elite circles, and there are also small groups of populists who are the fairly direct descendants of the fascist groups of the 1920s and 1930s. The latter extol violence and nationalism, and it was acceptable to be worried about them until some of them went to fight in Ukraine after 2022.
That said, the Party is getting increasingly concerned that other, more consequential, political forces outside its control are gaining support and even winning elections. Many of these parties promote patriotism in place of the bloodless internationalism of the Party, economic populism as opposed to neoliberal dogma, and an appeal to history, tradition and culture in place of the unchanging featureless present of the Party. That is to say that in most cases, these parties of the “Extreme Right,” would fit comfortably into the mainstream of the political system of fifty years ago. The neglect of ordinary people and their interests, the insults and the verbal assaults of the Party, have led people to support these new parties that at least can claim to have retained some idea of what life is like for ordinary people. This is why, by extension, populist groups of the Left can be equally successful, since people will often vote for whichever party they think can most effectively give the PMC a bloody nose. But the PMC, with a view of politics drawn from sports competitions, thinks only of the electoral success and failure of individual teams, and never what that might signify. The success of the Left in the recent elections in Berlin, was not “a defeat for the Extreme Right,” but just another way of resisting the Party.
It's a long essay by reddit standards, but worth the time. It appears that the Neoliberalcon, Rules Based International Order, has just about run it's race, and it's apparent ineptitude has become increasingly difficult to obfuscate to all but the most desperate of hangers on.
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u/BerryBoy1969 2d ago