THE ALT-RIGHT: A DEMOLITION JOB ON THESE LOSERS.

 Warwick Powell takes the so-called Alt-Right apart in this brilliant essay, and compares it to China.

The alt-right has distorted questions of economic power into ones of cultural-cum-racial identity, often mixed in with a good dose of eschatological ‘end of days’ mythology. Calls for a return to “traditional values” neglect to wonder about the material foundations that make such “values” even possible, let alone viable. The politics speaks wistfully of a return to traditional “family values” but refuses to countenance the need for real wages growth to make this even remotely possible. The growing focus on migrants, at times melding into discourses of neo-eugenic purity, ignores the political economy of structural inequality that cuts across racial lines, enabling a politics of cleansing without a politics of structural transformation.......The People’s Republic of China, by contrast, rejected liberalism at its founding in 1949 and has since built a developmental state that delivers tangible goods: housing, infrastructure, poverty alleviation and technological sovereignty. Arguably, China - as a civilisational state - was never encumbered by the ontologies of liberalism to start with, despite various efforts from the mid-to-late 1800s to introduce them. Where Western politics devolves into culture war, China grounds its political economy in production and circulation. The alt-right is not merely incapable of this; it is unwilling, for the very reason that it seeks to at the same time preserve the very capital the effects of which it claims to oppose......The alt-right’s platforms across various countries are united by what they lack: a serious economic vision grounded in structural root-causes. Anti-immigration, anti-globalism and “So-and-So First” slogans dominate, but no serious industrial or economic policy follows. Tariffs are proposed; assorted economic protectionist programs are threatened; but no fundamental reform of the institutions of finance are contemplated. Automation’s threat to labour is ignored, other than as a form of neo-Luddite cringe. Housing financialisation - private equity, Airbnb and zoning chokeholds, and now, 50 year mortgages - goes unaddressed beyond scapegoating the poor......The alt-right’s cultural fixation is that of the left’s, but in a negative image. The centre-left governed the West’s decline with social liberalism - assorted campaigns around rights, multiculturalism and whatever other form of identity politics you can imagine - while wages stagnated, factories closed and finance ran amok. The centre-left was left hollowed out after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and had nothing to say about the economic structures and institutions of the west. As for the disempowering effects of the democratic ruse of parliamentarism, the centre-left was incapable of articulating a meaningful alternative.

Blairite “third way” masked the realities of neoliberalism; it applied lipstick framed by marketing, but not much more. Privatisation and outsourcing of governmental functions transferred profit into private hands, while leaving the public to carry the risk, the reduced service standards and the need to pick up the tab for reparations and maintenance. Clinton’s “triangulation” and rhetoric of the “the reinvention of government” concealed the ongoing hollowing out of the post-war institutions of the socio-economic compact that took the rough edges of capitalism. The forty-year experiment has failed...The alt-right is a pressure valve for a system it refuses to replace.

The alt-right is the woke left’s shadow: same evasion but in different garb. Both manage decline through culture while fictitious capital feasts. China shows another path: reject liberalism’s economic premises, not just its social ones. Build; own; direct; and deliver.




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