Little Victories

Giorgia Meloni-- co-founding member of the Brothers of Italy, a far right nationalist, anti-immigation, traditional values party with fascist roots in the ultra-national groups she has been a member of since childhood, an admirer of Benito Mussolini and an exponent of replacement theory-- who is expected to soon become the next prime minister of Italy may not technically be a fascist if you are a stickler for these things. (According to the Italian observer at the link, she's more of a contemporary American Republican if you care to cull out a distinction from that).   But I could not help but be amused by Hillary Clinton's assessment of the prospect of Meloni-- a euro-sceptical, climate skeptical, anti-abortion, pro traditional family proponent-- as Prime Minister of Italy,  to wit: "Every time a woman is elected to head of state or government, that is a step forward."* 

The icing on the cake was seeing that Glenn Greenwald, in making a valid point critiquing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyden's promise to sanction Italy if it elected Meloni democratically, prefaced his tweet with an utterly vapid characterization of Meloni's significance through an anodyne Clinton-esque lens of identity: "Italy is on the verge of an election that will result in its first-ever female Prime Minister."  He later took pleasure in a tweet mocking Clinton's clueless second wave feminist take by rubbing her face in how Meloni's politics threaten the neoliberal world Clinton helped make. Erstwhile leftists Jimmy "Force the Vote" Dore and Jackson "MAGA Communism" Hinkle likewise expressed their approval for Meloni on different grounds, anti-vax sympathies in the case of Dore and performative anti-globalism in Hinkle's case.  

Harbinger of neoliberalism's long overdue death though it may be, the prospect of Meloni deepening Europe's ultra-rightward drift is disheartening to me at best.  And yet, churl that I am, I do take a perverted pleasure in the way in which Dore, Hinkle, Greenwald and Clinton team up for a chorus of twisted amens about her ascent, and in the process offer an unsolicited, free quartet of rare glimpses into the usually well-hidden logical conclusions of their steadfast commitments to their latest stunted ideologies, schemes, compulsions and predilections.

Granted, I have filtered the foregoing through my own years long struggle to reconcile my gut dislike of all of the aforementioned with the dribs and drabs of their collective output (minus Hinkle) that has occasionally challenged me in the past even when they did not accidentally overlap with my own in enough particulars.  It was a clarifying moment for me though, in a week of clarifying moments.  

Another came in reading a review of Steve Bannon's favorite Putin influencer Aleksandr Dugin's latest book by an anti-globalist conservative eloquently articulating the reasons for his endorsement of Dugin's views on what the neoliberal order should be replaced with that gets at the heart of where I part with those who the aforementioned erstwhile leftists urge solidarity with in the project of finishing off our common foes.  In his very reasoned and meticulous analysis of Dugin's critique of Davos culture and transhumanist Big Tech, the author demonstrates to me how in making common cause with anti-globalist "populist" right movements to topple the neoliberal order, the left risks echoing the outcome of the red-brown alliance in Weimar Germany in 1933.  These people may want the same fate for the current power structure that we do, but in terms of what comes next, they are absolutely not the allies of any who want freedom for all from want, from repression, from a doomed future for the species and the planet and for all of us to be able to live our lives in peace to our full capacities and desires.†  We should not be tailing the masses being seduced into allowing if not outright supporting a worldview even more repressive (if possible) (and it is possible) than the one we are in.  We should be leading and encouraging people to support an entirely new world of all of our making.

Finally, a friend shared with me a post  I may not have seen otherwise by Cory Doctorow at pluralistic.net "Federalist Society v Corporate Personhood" that abounded in very relevant illuminating insights about left and right that I will carry with me and for a long time.  For starters, quoting a Raw Timber commenter named Frank Wilhoit (but apparently not that Francis Wilhoit):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

Another quote further on: 

Leftists have an ideology – Steven Brust says, "if you think human rights are more important than property rights, you're on the left; if you think property right are human rights, you're on the right – but the left understands this ideology as connected to, arising from, and mobilized by the material conditions of its adherents. 

 And another:

As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind, the goal of the right is to create hierarchies in which the "best people" get to boss everyone else around. Christian Dominionists want to put men in charge of women and children; libertarians want to put bosses in charge of workers, imperialists want to put America in charge of other countries, racists want to put white people in charge of racialized people.

And a pithy diagnosis of one of the recurring strains in the culture wars:

Racism is an ideology – a terrible one – but increases and decreases in racism track to material anxieties, not better argument. Trump didn't make your uncle into an obsessive racism hobbyist with brilliant logic. He did it by linking your uncle's material anxieties to racist explanations.

My pessimism about the future based on the prospects for meaningful change for the many given the maddeningly reactionary trending of our politics as characterized most recently by events in Italy is severe.  I have spent an inordinate amount of the past 2 and a half years  in fruitless search of a successor to the project of the defeated Sanders campaign and been frustrated again and again by the chaotic state of discourse on the left.  My recent readings have not changed any of that.  But I may have found something I've been missing for the most part-- some validation that my naive belief in a better world is based on a solid foundation.  I am an island in an ocean of quicksand.  But maybe I'm that much more confident in my perception that some of these loudest most repulsive voices on the ostensible left that have been threatening to completely disillusion and dismay me for the past couple of years are not providing the alternative they profess to be; that my reluctance to hop aboard their train isn’t as much about the steadfastness of my reluctance as it is about the shoddiness of their train.  Confirmation of this arriving in snippets from beyond my horizon gives me some small hope that somewhere out there beyond the noisy demoralizing distraction, I cannot be alone in wanting better.  It's not much, but it's something.

 ~~~~~

* By this logic it's the same reaction she would have had if in the alternate reality of 2008, Vice President Sarah Palin was inaugurated as the US's first woman president following the untimely death of President John McCain in that administration's second term.

† It did have some very good advice for any movement that wants to succeed in building solidarity to accomplish its goals: Resist the temptation (so prevalent in leftist discourse in particular these days) to fight.  Discuss instead.  My suspicion is that taking this to heart is not only the biggest obstacle we have to getting the future we want, but perhaps the surest way for the left to find out who its real enemies are and who its soldiers will be in the process.