Umair Haque
There’s a particularly funny, foolish, and gruesomely self-destructive myth making the rounds these days. It originates from the place all of today’s foolish myths of political economy do: America. The myth goes like this: “fascism is rising because white people are becoming a minority!! They’re scared — it’s cultural anxiety!!” Neoliberals, who tell this myth, have spawned a whole new phraseology for it: apparently, American whites are afraid of “cultural displacement.”
Now, to use this myth is to play right into the hands of the bad guys — the fascists. To see how, let’s examine this myth. Is it really true?
Do you know when America’s projected to be minority white? Given the myth, you might think by 2020, or maybe 2025 at the latest. In fact, it’s not set to happen until 2045. That’s a generation away, my friends. Do you worry about 2045? Do you think about it daily? The myth falls apart at the slightest touch.
Then there’s the mechanism. Do people suddenly develop a sixth sense of impending racial doom? Is there some kind of telegraphic awareness that spreads throughout people of a skin color? Do they suddenly have shared panic attacks? Of course not. It’s not as if white people are telepathically discussing census results. Nor is it as if most white people are walking around obsessively brooding on the the number “2045.” I’d bet if we asked most white people “what do you think will happen in 2045?”, their answers would be anything but “becoming a minority” — everything from “the planet melts down” to “I finally pay off my student debt?”
And what kind of “culture” is it precisely that American whites are going to lose? Hotdogs and ribs? Baseball? Fox News? Trips to Home Depot? Country music? Religion? Small-town bakeries? I don’t mean that in a derisive way — I mean that all kinds of people partake in all those things. Even I have a pair of cowboy boots and an LL Bean shirt or five and grew up going to shows at the 9:30 Club and the Limelight. Was I “displacing” someone — or was I becoming American? I can’t think of a single thing that white American “culture” really is exclusively, in the way that, say, Venetian carnivals and Parisian fashion are— a thing that only really belongs to a particular social group. American culture, unlike European culture, is a genuine melding. From jazz to literature to art to dance, none of it fully belongs to any one group — and never has. Who popularized rock’n’roll? Elvis or Chuck Berry? What makes American culture uniquely its own is precisely that, unlike in Europe, no one group can claim it exclusively.
So not only is the myth funnily absurd at a social level, it’s absurd at a psychological and a cultural level, too. I think it’s an insult to white people, frankly, to say that they’re so fearful and narrow, but I digress. Now, let me discuss the problems this myth serves, and then I’ll come back to the reality it hides.
When neoliberals propound the myth of cultural anxiety, they end up doing something astonishingly damaging and foolish. They fan the flames of fascism. In three specific ways. If it’s true that white people are suddenly becoming a minority, then of course the idea of “white genocide” and persecution and so on are reinforced as a kind of paranoid fantasy. If it’s true that demographic change is causing fascism — then the only way to stop fascism is to reverse demographic change. Build those walls! But wait! That’s exactly what the fascists want, too. If it’s true that white people are losing their culture — well, then I guess jazz, nightclubs, novels, literature, and plays all must have only ever been written by, ready by, performed by, and attended by whites, too. Wait — that’s exactly what the fascists, want, also!
So “cultural displacement” must mean that either other people have no culture — or that you have a culture that’s so different, so fragile, so precious, it falls apart the moment anyone touches it. It can’t be shared — it’s zero-sum. But am I “displacing” you when I sit next to you at a movie theater? On an airplane? At a job? If I am, then don’t all those things really belong to you? Wait — all of those positions are precisely what fascists also believe, aren’t they?
Yet the reverse isn’t true. You don’t hear neoliberals talking about the “cultural displacement anxieties” of all those poor people that get driven out of gentrified neighborhood after neighborhood, do you? Or the “cultural displacement anxieties” of the kids in the camps. Or even the “cultural displacement anxieties” of of the rest of us, white, black, brown, whatever, of being displaced by the fascists, just normal people who think fascism’s probably a hell of a lot worse than a society of equals, whatever color, creed, or religion they are. Gee, I wonder why that is? Maybe neoliberals, not exactly renowned for their taste or humanity, don’t really know what culture is, to begin with.
To say that I “displace” you culturally, and therefore, you are anxious, is exactly the zero-sum logic of fascism. Which is also the logic of paranoia, victimization, and persecution. But nobody is out to persecute, victimize, or get the “culturally anxious” in the sense that their paranoias suggest. Nobody’s coming to take away your corndogs and late-night football games, and impose Sharia law (except maybe Mike Pence). Yet we’re told that if people believe it, then it must be true — no matter how foolish such a belief is. Without investigating, really, why people might believe such paranoid, bizarre things, to begin with. “Cultural anxiety” is really another way of saying: the persecution and victimization complexes of fascists are real. But if they are, then fascism has every reason to exist, doesn’t it?
Do you see how liberalism plays right into fascism’s hands when it propounds this foolish myth? How it legitimates, normalizes, and justifies fascism? So here we see a kind of fatal convergence — neoliberalism and fascism dovetailing to precisely the same ruinous folly. “Whites are in danger!”, cry the fascists. “Whites are becoming a minority — their culture is in danger”, cry the neoliberals. “Yeah! Our culture will never be theirs!”, cry the fascists.
But if your culture cannot include people who are different from you, then what place does it have in a democratic society? If it’s zero-sum, then it must be inherently discriminatory, to begin with — and that goes for all cultures. And in that sense, it’s less a culture, a civilizing tool, and more a mechanism to preserve superiority — it must, by definition, be racist, bigoted, or prejudiced. Go ahead and think it through. Conversely, if you are claiming all the products of a democratic society as “your culture”, then isn’t the very same thing true? Both are essentially ideological forms of proto-fascism.
(So no matter how you cut it, if we legitimate ideas of demography and “displacement”, we’ll end up supporting fascists, always — because that’s their ideology, too. “Hey! They’re afraid of losing their small town to people who are different from them!” Wait — if I listen to country music and wear cowboy boots and have small-town values, only I’m brown — am I still “different”? There’s no way around it, my friends. You can’t have it both ways — be a democracy of equals, but also a caste society.)
LOL. How funny. How tragic.
Luckily for thinking people, none of this is reality. Fascism has never — not once in human history — been driven by demographic change, a majority becoming a minority. Germans were under no demographic threat in the 1930s. Poles and Austrians are under no demographic threat. Nor are Italians. Whatever refugees and immigrants have arrived on these shores, they’re hardly to about to establish states where sipping coffee and wine, among other staples of European cultural life, are suddenly outlawed. And yet, neofascist politics are rising in all these places, aren’t they? Either it must be a huge coincidence — or the reason must be something very different than demographic change and “cultural displacement.” What reason might that be?
Neoliberals, to a person, refuse to accept that the economy isn’t doing so well. “The economy’s booming!”, they cry, looking at growth rates. ButAmerican growth is predatory now. The rich take more than 100% of the economy’s gains. So while “growth” is certainly happening, it’s now coming at the expense of the (former) middle class, the poor, the young, and the elderly. All those social groups are beginning to suffer in ruinous ways — the old, who’ll never retire, the young, who’s life expectancy is falling, the middle class, which has become the new poor, and so on.
Neoliberalism is the world’s most catastrophic failure since Soviet-era Leninist socialism. It has driven America from a place of if not European prosperity, then at least a nation a reasonably prosperous middle class, some degree of mobility, and democracy, to a place that is collapsing into authoritarianism, by way of precarity, despair, and singularly gruesome ruin — school shootings, opioid epidemics, crowdfunded healthcare.
Neoliberals propound the myth that this is a special moment of white cultural anxiety driven by intense demographic change to hide their own ruinous failures to create anything resembling a working economy. Yet the simple fact is that this not an especially anxious or different or special moment of demographic change for Americans. The only true demographic change in America that diverges from long term trends isn’t immigration — it’s a skyrocketing suicide rate. Hence, the reason that fascism is rising is the one thing neoliberals will never admit — their very own failure.
The global economy that neoliberalism made is a repeat of the 1930s — only in a perhaps even more dangerous way. Then, “imbalances” piled up between nations — some nations owed others too much debt, which they couldn’t repay. This time, imbalances have piled up all over again, not between nations, but between social classes. Wages and incomes are stagnant, across the rich world. Inequality is skyrocketing. Even China faces issues of middle class slowdown now. The global economy is coming undone. Precisely because predatory capitalism created a new class of ultra rich, who are so wealthy that, like Jeff Bezos, they outdo the kings of yore. Whose fortunes could pay off the national debts of entire countries, not to mention social groups. That has left an imploded middle — a hole, where prosperity should be.
When that imploded middle collides with long-standing exclusionary sentiments, fuelled by demagogues, the fatal cocktail of the 1930s repeats itself. “They are to blame for your poverty!”, bellows the demagogue, pointing at immigrants, refugees, minorities, and so forth. Just like in Germany, there was no real demographic threat — but there was historic anti-Semitism, which was like gasoline to stagnation’s match.
In America, this has been particularly easy — because there is a large segment of the white population which has never really been fully civilized, in the sense of genuinely accepting and celebrating others as their equals, versus merely reluctantly obeying the law. In many places, whites have held onto the inherent sense of superiority that was granted to them until 1971 — when segregation ended. But that wasn’t so long ago. And so it hasn’t taken very much at all for these same old racial attitudes to resurface — because they barely had time to be socialized and civilized away in the first place. Hence, at the merest hint of a new poverty, of a fall in relative status, income, and wealth, the very groups which never really gave up on their inherent superiority were easily seduced by nationalist supremacy.
So fascism, as always, presents us with a subtle picture. Stagnation, which is like a match on the fuel of old tensions between racial or ethnic groups, setting fire to whole societies, seemingly overnight. But for that very reason, the truth is that fascism is never, ever really about the racial or ethnic tensions it pretends to be about. Fascism is always about political economy — generally, a collapsing society and an imploded middle class, first and foremost. To think otherwise, to suppose that the delusions, paranoias, persecution complexes, and anxieties of fascists are real, is to legitimize it, to justify it, to strengthen it — to play right into its hands.
Unfortunately, that’s what neoliberals are doing today — though they might not know it. I don’t think they’re bad people necessarily. But they’ve always been modernity’s fools. Reverently admiring capitalism. Telling the world that vice and cruelty and greed were virtue. Proclaiming an end to history — while repeating it. And if you needed a final confirmation of all that, then let it be this.
Umair
August 2018
August 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment