The imminent defenestration of the hapless Liz Truss that
will end her flash premiership after mere weeks will result in the year’s
third U.K. prime minister who, unlike the previous two, will have not been
elected by anyone. Truss, for all her manifold faults, at least won a
legitimizing vote in her favor by the Tory party membership. Boris Johnson, preceding
her, was the beneficiary of a general election in which the country
resoundingly opted for his party’s continuation in power.
Truss was famously engraved in memory by being the last
person to appear publicly with the late Queen Elizabeth. But while QE edges
even closer to immortality than she did while alive, we will soon wonder if LT ever
existed at all.
Meanwhile, on our side of the Atlantic, we trudge grimly
toward an election whose results seem guaranteed to resolve nothing about who
should captain the ship of state. Election night returns, that core element of
democratic rule, will be challenged in courts throughout the land. Ostensible
winners will be promptly denied and discredited before the ballot inks are dry.
Some losers will say the vote totals were rigged; others that the computerized
voting systems are hackable, perhaps by foreign geniuses; and still others that
the voting arrangements were cynically calculated to deny hostile blocs access
to the urns.
Even where numerical vote totals seem more or less
accurately to reflect voter choice, we will remain shadowed by hoary traditions
like the blatant gerrymander, the plague of the Electoral College, and the
ongoing usurpation by a Supreme Court determined to re-legislate the last 50
years, wielding a majority installed by a minority-vote president.
While we are rallied to support overseas war-making as a
defense of “democracy” versus some sort of oriental authoritarianism, citizens
of the collective West enjoy less of it than ever. If the Republicans retake
control of the Senate—which I anticipate—the filibuster (that Democrats insist
on treating as hallowed tradition) will be quickly jettisoned into the dustbin
of history, and a new GOP legislative-judicial dictatorship will show us how
the Will to Power really works.
Why is democracy failing us so badly and broadly and not
just us but Europeans, too? They face a hungry and frigid winter but will be
treated only to bland phrases and non-solutions from the unelected EU pooh-bahs
who regularly overrule their presidents and prime ministers, increasingly reduced
to figureheads and placeholders.
I suggest that it is because the failures of late
financialized capitalism are now impossible to ignore and that “the will of the
people” cannot be satisfied under current conditions. Whatever voters may want
and manage to articulate in their voting choices, the political classes of the collective
West cannot provide it. There is no prosperity, no healthy growth, no essential
services, no social cohesion, no infrastructural modernization, no cooperative
mobilization (e.g., for climate change), and certainly no peace possible as
long as we continue to tolerate the dictatorship of concentrated wealth that
now marks our world. While we scrap over transgender bathrooms and mass
imprisonment, who is tougher on crime and who knows how to raise children, bloated
plutocrats steadily push us toward a neo-feudalism in which only the incalculably
rich retain any agency over their own lives.
The bright side of this march cliff-ward is that our
capacity for belief is rapidly shrinking, and that is a very good thing. Undoubtedly,
this growing skepticism towards officialdom is accompanied by many “morbid
symptoms” as Gramsci warned are characteristic of an imploding system. We enjoy
marveling at the credulousness of the adversary but will gradually appreciate
where we ourselves have bought the shiny object and will discover fraud.
This weekend, I attended a fundraiser for the New York
Progressive Action Network, which grew out of the 2016 Bernie campaign. It
continues to advocate for popular (and populist) policies in health, education,
housing, labor, transportation, and the like. Unfortunately, the speeches were
almost exclusively from or about elected officials, and while speakers
occasionally warned that we would not “play along” with the establishment Democrats
forever, the focus of the event was to keep doing exactly that. We need a more
expansive vision.
As stated above, I fully expect next months’ midterms to
result in the Democrat wipe-out that some Pollyannas continue to think can yet
be avoided. A party with such a stellar record of failure cannot expect to
avoid total discredit; but the other one’s will follow in due course, and we
should lament neither. Those empty suits are mere hod-carriers to the real
elites, and we needn’t take them seriously. Their role is to inflame emotions
and distract us from the dysfunction at the core of our social arrangements.
The sooner we see through them, the faster we will begin to formulate
alternatives.
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