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/247/ Why Isn't There Revolution pt. 2, ft. Vivek Chibber (Patreon)

Published:
2022-03-08 06:30:00
Edited:
2022-04-05 11:02:43
Imported:
2024-07
Tags:

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[Patreon Exclusive]

On nostalgia, populism and postmodernism.

In the second part of the interview, we deal with contemporary political questions. Why is everyone nostalgic for the postwar era - and can there be a radical politics that seeks to 'go back'? Can the organisational vehicles of the past be revived? 

What has been the legacy of postmodernism, as it has been absorbed into popular culture? And why can't the left accept it has won on culture?

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Comments

Paul Brewer

I found some of the comments on US politics needing a bit of a push back. When NAFTA was passed, the strongest backers of the treaty were the Republicans, while the Democrats split over it. The interesting question is how have material interests changed to make it seem like the Democrats were tied to this treaty, while the ostensibly Republican Trump took up the banner of reform. I don't know enough about it myself, so perhaps there is a topic for an episode here, if you can find the right guest. I am more confident in criticising the idea that the turn to 'cultural politics' is anything new, at least in a very broad sense. I would go so far as to say that the fundamental split between Democrats and Republicans and their forebears was and remains, in fact, a cultural one. The cultural divide at the core of America started between a high-church 'Establishment' and a low-church 'Populism'. The proto-Democrats at the outset were predominantly low-church and demotic in tone. The proto-Republicans were high-church and more urbane. It doesn't exactly follow in every case, as a low-church urbane figure like John Adams might suggest, but you would be right a lot more often than not. (Also, for reasons explained in the next paragraph, Catholics don't fit this pattern.) We have seen this manifest itself in US history, such as a now-forgotten controversy over the use of the Bible in Cincinnati schools in the 1870s. Prohibition was perhaps the most obvious explosion of a cultural issue into national politics, and was an issue of some importance in the 1928 and 1932 presidential elections that followed. The odd thing is that the parties have flip-flopped, with the Democrats now being the more urbane and the Republicans the demotic. This cultural divide was also an element in the way the Democrats have ALWAYS been the party aligned with the interest of immigrants, going right back to the first 'immigration scare' in the 1830s. This was inspired by a fear of 'popery', which the Democrats seemed disinterested in stoking, seeing easy votes from urban masses here. Indeed, the Republican party itself is a product of a merger between anti-immigrant, anti-slavery 'Know-Nothings' of 1850s vintage and more disparte anti-slavery forces drawn from both the Democrats and the failing Whig party. Anti-savery and anti-immigration formed the basis for this coalition, but people have put the latter out of mind. This is possibly the most consistent political divide in American political history, so it's hardly surprising that the GOP remains more likely to institute a hostile environment towards illegal immigration, despite the value of illegal immigrants to meat-packing and other agriculture-rooted occupations. (As for the Catholics, the non-Hispanic ones definitively decamped from the Democrats to the Republicans in 2000, and their Hispanic neighbours seem to be following suit, more slowly.)

Eli S

I came back to this after some of the more recent material, and now I actually think the critique of culturalism/the Cultural Turn needs to be pressed even harder than Chibber presses it. The Cultural Turn and "postmodernism" as described actually amount to a quite nasty proposition: that "culture" is really a realm of necessity, not a realm of freedom. So "hyperpolitics" ends up being regressive even relative to a fairly plain liberalism, in terms of what it admits as free choices people can make together without being subject to someone else's veto. I'm thinking particularly of how, later in the year, after this podcast, my city got into the national news for an incident in which some Left activists (most likely members of a local DSA working group) basically posted an "enemies list" of names and addresses to their website with a call for these enemies to be "physically disrupted". The thing being, they were listing off a significant fraction of local civil-society organizations: there were some philanthropy offices you'd never have thought about, but there were also a variety of normal-people things, including a high school. Basically, an attempt by The Left(TM) to exercise a heckler's veto on the liberal mainstream within civil society, since even by their own admission nothing under discussion was criminal as such. If you sincerely believe in culturalism, then the above is just politics: hey, this high school and that house of worship are reinforcing an oppressive ideological superstructure, so what right do they have to be exempt from ruthless critique, or even polemical attack? But if you're not a culturalist, the idea that cultural life needs to "pass" a Left activist examination is a censorious restriction on your realm of freedom.