The New Year and Beyond

So, at fifty years, I look at the world around me and view it through the eyes of Antonio Gramsci. In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Gramsci wrestled with the question of why working people would align themselves with the reactionary right (fascists and others) who smashed unions, curtailed basic rights, and attacked working class interests. His conclusion was that the wealthy had achieved an ideological hegemony. Not only did the wealthy control the financial resources in the nation, they also controlled the production of ideas. People were sold on the ideas that foreigners, Jews, socialists, and lazy people were the source of their problems. Sound familiar?


Due to the Great Recession brought about by the conservative policies to redistribute wealth to the already wealthy, we live in a time very similar to the aftermath of the Great Depression. After the Great Depression, the world split into radical left movements for economic justice, including anarchists, communists, and socialists and the reactionary right, promoting the interests of the wealthy, including corporatist elitists and fascists. In Spain, equality and anarchist principles had enjoyed a short victory before the world conspired to support the fascists, crushing the embryonic movement of freedom and autonomy. On the other side was the reactionary right, the fascists - the corporatists who felt government on behalf of corporations is a government that favors people, especially if you can eliminate undesirable people from your borders. Again, sound familiar?


While we do not have the pseudo-scientific fiction of eugenics to drive the murderous intentions of fascists, we do have a resurgence of xenophobia and race hate in the world community. Governments vacillate between the democratic socialist policies of Bolivia and the corporatism of Pinochet’s Chile. In the US, Sanders’ popularity is the flowering of the despair with the current system. Trump is the infection taking hold, fed by astro-turfing the reactionary right tea-party movement. The Tea-Party Frankenstein’s monster Republicans struggle to control preys upon the same dissatisfaction with the future under our current system, but gives it a distinctly racialized and xenophobic twist. But, let’s not confuse all who supported Trump with those who exhibit the most appalling characteristics of the fascist (renamed “alt-right") movement. The support for change that tilted toward Trump is drawn from the same well as those who supported change exhibited by Sanders.


At this point, perhaps some clarification is overdue. When we talk about conservative and liberal, they have very precise political and economic definitions. However, most people do not use these precise definitions outside of political or the academic world. It is also important to note that what conservative and liberal politicians say publicly is very different from their actual policies. Conservatives have been anything but fiscally responsible and liberals have instituted policies that undermine people of color and the poor. When I critique conservative and liberal, I am talking specifically about the party leadership and intellectual roots. Conservatives, as a rule, like liberals, are not really fully aware of, or agree with, the very specific (and nearly always unstated) economic and foreign policy objectives of the parties. I think we need to get beyond this false dichotomy of conservative and liberal in the population. Both conservative and liberal folks need to shuck those ridiculously outdated labels and see their common interests and struggles. If not, the reality of hateful clashes of the past few years will only grow in intensity.


Another important point of clarification, conservatives have controlled the majority of governorships, state legislatures, and congress since about 2010. So, when people argued to drain the swamp, it was the conservatives sitting on the stumps with big, fat fuckin grins on their faces admiring the fact that people completely missed the conservative control of government. People who voted for a “change” were really saying “I love this shit sandwich; is it possible to turn this into a full-on fecal buffet!”


The task at hand, according to Gramsci, is to create a counter-hegemony to help us make sense of the world around us - to allow the folks who seek change under Trump to come together with those who seek change under Sanders. Even my own analysis of fascism makes this difficult, but I feel we need to call things what they are. We need to identify what is really going on, but in doing so, we must be surgically precise. Not all Trump followers are fascists, and not all Clinton supporters have your best interests in mind. If the Democratic party had the insight of political economy and were willing to challenge our current corporate dominated economy, they would have won this election handily. Instead, they spit in the face of working people by rigging the system in favor of a very contentious candidate and ignoring the issues that really concern working folks.


Democrats had reality on their side. Conservatives have orchestrated every deficit in the recent past to fuel defense spending, while Democrats have balanced budgets. Wisconsin and Minnesota are great examples of two very different trajectories. Wisconsin is mired in slow job growth, low wage levels, and a state deficit while Minnesota is one of the best states for business, solid economic recovery, and has a $1.5 billion surplus in its state budget. The recent control of both houses of the state legislature by conservatives threatens Minnesota’s more comfortable economic position. Low tax states like Texas, Kansas, and South Dakota are some the worst places to live if you actually work for a living. Unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and social services are slashed to favor the accumulation of wealth by the very wealthiest in our society.


What did Democrats do with this information? Nothing! They did not want to offend the folks that butter their bread, so they keep their mouth shut, said the same shit the Republicans did, and really did not pose an alternative. The failure to keep someone as offensive as Trump out of the White House falls squarely on the strategists in the Democratic party. They did not create or utilize an existing counter-hegemony to give people a reason to believe that they would be any different than the alternative.


The next fifty years are going to be shaped by this movement of history - the struggle of working people against the wealthy. As we face a world where social policy is designed to wrest decision making out of democratic processes and locate it among few elite interests, we will see budgets and legislation that will make addressing future concerns near impossible. The goal of conservatives is to ratchet down the options for budgets, increasingly privatize social goods like retirement, and promote election laws favoring the wealthy. Once budgets are slashed, prisons and schools are privatized, your health care and retirement is a function of the stock market, it will be painfully difficult to fix the problems these trends will create.


The gross deficits are not a failure of conservative policy (or supposed tax-and-spend liberals), but a concerted success by conservatives to fuck us. By creating a deficit, conservatives posit the only alternative, cutting programs. The whole point was to cut the programs that meet the needs of the majority of the population, but by insanely inflating the deficit, conservatives find little opposition to budget cuts. As his first priority, Walker intentionally unbalanced the Wisconsin budget so he could fuck the working people of Wisconsin. The current budget deficit is a conscious policy of Walker’s pro-wealthy agenda to continue to call for budget austerity and further “fuck you” budget cuts to those that truly need economic relief. When it comes time to address the gaping hole in the budget and the crumbling infrastructure, returning to previous tax levels is nearly impossible. Any time tax levels are restored prior levels, the conservatives can blame the liberals for “tax increases.”


Right now, the buck is being passed from the federal to the state and down to the municipal level. Budget cuts at the federal level show up as increased fees such as licences and tuition, bond measures, and tax increases locally. Fucked up tax policy favoring the wealthy promotes tax increases elsewhere. After creating the conditions that require shifting tax burdens, conservatives conveniently hold up liberals as the promoters of high taxes. It is great fukin racket. Destroy the budget, then piss on your neighbor and say he dribbled on himself.

My Election Manifesto

I have waited a few days to weigh in n the current election fallout, but I have seen some disturbing trends that I want to address.

For those who supported a Trump victory, I congratulate you on your successful mobilization. Any social movement needs a motivated base to energize each other. If I were to make predictions, roughly I would expect that your condition will not improve during a Trump presidency, but there will be a number of groups whose quality of life will decline over the next few years. Some folks have already experienced this on my campus and in the nation as a whole.

If Trump lives up to his platform, I expect the nation to go as Wisconsin has gone under Walker. Economic growth will be sluggish as it relates to working people. They will continue to be dissatisfied with their economic lot and their future. The deficit will ballon as a direct result of those policies, as it has in Wisconsin. People will be no less bitter or disgusted with the direction of the country, and it will likely worsen over the next decade (it may take more than four years to further cripple this economy - Bush's economic collapse unfolded at the very end of his term).

However, what has pained me the most is the rhetoric after the election. The very same people who so desperately wanted to distance themselves from Clinton by arguing they voted against Trump are not affording their opposition the same courtesy. The rhetoric that I see and hear in the media and in conversation is about how racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic Trump supporters are. These are the same folks who cry foul when people lump an entire religion with acts of violence. This duplicity is the hallmark of the "liberal." Let me note that "liberals" are an entirely different species than progressives or radicals, but I do not have time to go into that here.

At the same time liberals decry acts of discrimination before and after the election, these very same people discriminate against people of color in their workplaces. This discrimination is hidden and deprives people of color the same opportunities whites receive simply because of skin color, religion, or nation of origin. The visible hate speech and hate crimes that have been perpetrated are psychologically harmful, but they are out in the open, and all people of good conscience can come together to console each other. The discrimination that takes place in search committees, hiring decisions, and behind closed doors is sheltered away from public view and proceeds relatively unchallenged in our society.

The very same people who decry the discriminatory actions during and after this election are the very same folks who perpetrate this closed-door discrimination. This is the duplicity that I have been fighting since 2013 in my own backyard. There is a statistic in a film I show, "Race the Power of an Illusion," that states, when you hold wealth and income the same, you cannot tell whites and people of color apart on a number of indicators like success in education and work. If wealth and income are equal, all ethnicities are equal. We also know that people with ethnic sounding names are 50% less likely to get a callback on a resume. They are discriminated against in hiring. They are discriminated against in the classroom. But, they also are equal to whites when wealth and income are the same. This means that people of color have to work harder to maintain that equality. They have to work harder just to keep pace with whites. This is the result of discriminatory acts perpetrated by liberals as well as conservatives.

So, I want to call out those liberals who are so quick to dismiss the people who voted against Clinton. Yes, Trump is a horrible human being with deplorable attitudes, but Clinton is a classist, ethnocentric, civilizational mission spouting, warmongering oligarch. Her foregin policy is no less racist that Trump's Victorian-era small-mindedness, but Clinton shares Trump's international perspective that is just a retooled version of the "white man's burden." Our interventionist foreign policy and the racist implications for those killed, maimed, and starved by it, are easily forgotten when people voted against Trump.

No, you cannot console yourself by calling people who voted for Trump racists, etc. You fucking duplicitous bastards are calling the kettle black. This is precisely why liberals find it so difficult to comprehend why the working class has turned against them. You lump them in a category of "deplorables" and expect them to see the error of their ways by joining in your moral superiority. That classist bullshit just does not play with working people.

I know liberals are stunned by the outcome of the election. I know liberals cannot comprehend how so many people could vote for a person with so few qualifications and such a horrible worldview. What you have to understand is that liberals decided to cajole their primary system to produce a candidate who has a long history of being detested, and granted, a great deal of that hatred (from conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike) is due simply to the fact that Clinton is a very strong woman in a nearly exclusively male arena. But, she is also a pretty shitty person and candidate. Liberals ignored that fact, and paid the price. Don't blame the opposition for your lack of foresight. The fact that the race was even close given the quality of the opposition should tell you something about your own mobilization strategy and the quality of your candidate.

We live in a time where we should learn from the past. Reactionary movements are bred out of economic despair and struggle. The liberals had a perfect opportunity to reach out to working people and demonstrate that they could address their concerns. Bernie's popularity mobilized a certain sector of the population, but liberals thought it was enough to focus on his base, but they ignored a huge segment of the population who could have benefitted from grassroots mobilization. Instead, the duplicitous hubris of the liberal party marginalized those folks, intentionally making them feel inadequate and morally bankrupt.

You fucking assholes got what you deserved, and now we, including those who voted for Trump, will have to suffer the consequences. Now, the whole nation gets to feel the despair, fruitlessness, and divisive atmosphere of Wisconsin. Thank you, you rotten liberal fucks.

Patriotism in the US

Patriotism is a weird thing in the US. People go to the mat defending an old drinking song, and two words inserted in the national anthem during the height of 1950's paranoia. There is so little that is uniquely US culture that people lose their minds defending stuff that is not really "traditional."  Christmas is a great example of something that was not traditional, especially at the time of the "founding fathers."

The US is a nation with a history always under the influence of capitalist culture, which is a homogenizing culture-less process. Trump's popularity is rooted in US culture-less capitalist culture - people, who feel at-risk, fear losing something that they never had, but the elite tell you things were better when this non-existent past existed. I understand why it happens, but that still doesn't take away from the fact that US politics are insane. 

I may be wrong, but I think there are few nations that have such widespread displays of their flag, and peppered throughout the year. People have to fly the damn thing because they are afraid of losing what they never had. It is a symbol of US paranoia more than it is a symbol of pride and solidarity.

Structural Adjustment of Wisconsin Revisited

Given the direction of the presidential election, it may be worthwhile to revisit the economic tragedy that is Wisconsin. The neoliberal Walker gutting of the state has led to a widening gulf between Wisconsin and Minnesota, which took the opposite direction in the economic crisis. There are no shortage of articles pointing out the obvious comparisons.

Here is one blog that outlines the comparison. http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2015/01/minnesota-economy-beats-wisconsin-7-charts-1-table/

Minnesota is wrestling with a budget surplus, while Wisconsin is mired in a deficit. Minnesota's economy has outpaced Wisconsin in nearly all respects. Knowledge of the effects of structural adjustment allowed me to see the writing on the wall. http://klogholesbloghole.blogspot.com/2011/03/stuctural-adjustment-of-wisconsin.html

Even the budget surplus in Minnesota is low-hanging fruit for those that want to push neoliberal cuts. Right now, legislators are pushing for tax cuts in Minnesota, a mechanism to put a stranglehold on the budget in the future. The whole purpose of tax cuts is to ensure, like a boa constrictor, the budget can only get smaller, making the everyday operation of the government ever more difficult. It is a deliberate strategy to gut social spending, but it also undermines the economy as a whole.

These policies occur not just at the local level, but at the national level as well. Given the slate of candidates in the presidential election, and the bizarre party politics playing out, it is time to start paying attention. Clearly, we need a change of direction at the national level as well as avoid the failed policies in Wisconsin.