No Simple Victory in a World Such as Ours, Research Time, 18/06/2018

Being a pretty active member – and occasional contractor – for the New Democratic Party in Toronto means I regularly have conversations with lots of different kinds of marxists.

That includes self-identified marxists, and folks who are only considered marxists according to the new popular conception of marxism. You know it – where people who think there should be a state-subsidized pharmacare plan are functionally indistinguishable from Josef Stalin.

The caption reads, "Study! Because we will need all your intelligence."
The painting is by the Italian artist SOLO. Its location is the entrance
to Antonio Gramsci Secondary School on Affogalasino Street in Rome.

See, I don’t really like to call myself a marxist because it always gets people ascribing philosophical views to me that I don’t actually hold. Telling someone that you’re a marxist tends to make a lot of folks think that all your ideas are just regurgitated from the Cliff’s Notes of Kapital. That’s true whether or not you actually want them to think this. Usually, you don’t, but it can’t be helped once you use the m-word.

But it’s a much more complicated tradition that folks in the popular media give it credit for. A lot of that is because of the nuanced analyses of political economy that you find in Marx’s own later works. I was reading about that Sunday morning on a pleasant deck in Riverdale.

Today, I want to go over some of my notes on Gilbert, his take on how Antonio Gramsci transformed the marxist tradition.

As you might remember from my last post, a major task for my district association’s policy work is figuring out the key differences in the drift of working class union folks from the New Democratic Party in Canada. It’s a shift that puts the lie to the Cliff’s Notes version of marxism – class is always the primary vector for social consciousness.

I’ve had self-identified marxists tell me this. They should know better. Don’t act like Antonio Gramsci didn’t exist. His influence remains strong today, in many parts of the world.

Gilbert focusses on what he takes to be a central transformation in how the term ‘hegemony’ was used, giving it an entirely new philosophical spin. He remixed and mangled this old concept from political science – the direct or indirect leadership of a privileged class (inside a state) or a military power (internationally).

The slogans of my own country's current
leading intellectuals aren't quite so
inspiring to me.

He turned this term into a concept that we could use in all vectors of activism that seeks cultural and economic transformation. For a group to have hegemony in a culture means that the group’s mainstream and accepted images, political frameworks, economic systems, moralities, and ethical principles pressure all other such cultural and economic elements around the globe to conform to its own structures.

In other words, the old 19th century political science concept of hegemony: imagine an American fleet pulling into your harbour and forcing you to open up a McDonald’s. Military power backs economic and cultural transformation.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: imagine an American businessman flying to your country, co-opting all your local businessmen to open McDonald’s franchises, and then the popularity of their menu causes people to drift away from their more traditional foods. Economic power backs cultural and moral transformation.

Then Gilbert flies through an account of how Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe updated Gramsci’s concepts. They brought research on how the global economy was changing from the era of Western stagflation onward. So from the 1970s.

Laclau and Mouffe – in their joint and solo books – described how cultural power can lead the way in a hegemonic transformation, not only military and economic power. Identity politics like nationalism bind communities together in movements for economic change and even military civil insurrection.

Any aspect of human existence can become the leading edge in a liberating or a revanchist social revolution. It could be violent or peaceful, or a mixture of all degrees of inspiration and blood. What matters is that circumstances align to bring one vector into a hegemonic intensity of influence.

What are those circumstances? How do we manage them? How do we understand them? Change them?

Whither Capital III: Troubles With Apu, Research Time, 01/06/2018

What were you going to do about it? What were you going to do to resist the socially and ecologically destructive forces of globalizing industry and finance?

Throughout the 20th century, the default* course for the Western left to take was to look to the Soviet Union. Not the real Soviet Union, of course, which had far too much an excess of gulags, secret police, and general misery. I mean the Soviet Union that existed in its government’s international PR materials, and in the naïve hearts of privileged socialists of the Reagan Years.

* That is, the easiest and laziest.

Fighting the cultural and ethnic stereotyping you face in a mainstream
is an important element of revolutionizing a people's morality. And
the academics of Cultural Studies developed a lot of important
concepts for that critique. But is it sufficient to transform an entire
culture's morality to the necessary degree? That I don't think so.

Then the USSR collapsed. This was no End of History™, no matter how much liberal political tastemakers tried to demonstrate it. The Soviet Union, economically speaking, was the most thoroughly Fordist state that ever existed – the most complete standardization a government had ever attempted. It was a fully state-controlled economy whose purpose was primarily production within its borders.

The forces of globalization raging throughout the rest of the world tore the Soviet economy to pieces like the winds of a hurricane. The USSR’s borders couldn’t maintain their territory – literally. Capitalism destroys institutions of economic control. That’s terrible in some cases, but very beneficial in others.

Here’s where real history dovetails with the flickering shadows of conspiracist thought. Because the academic discipline of Cultural Studies – especially in Britain, where Jeremy Gilbert focusses his analysis – really was a form of cultural marxism.

Broadly speaking, this was a project among politically progressive and radical university professors in a particular discipline to see what cultural fields could promote revolutionary ideas, now that the major state source for socialist inspiration was torn to bits. In this sense, it followed the recommendations of a notorious duo at the forefront of developing revolutionary political philosophy.

No, I’m not talking about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the devils of the American nationalist conspiracy of cultural marxism. Their actual ideas are remarkably defeatist. Andrew Breitbart just happened to read them, and knew of Adorno because of his friendship with the Black American revolutionary Angela Davis.

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are the duo that Jeremy Gilbert – as well as myself – see as the most important in turning marxist thought to issues of culture. But when you read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the direction Cultural Studies went in wouldn’t have been quite what they had in mind.

Here are the people I refer to when I write Cultural Studies. University-based cultural theorists writing analyses of popular culture and arts using concepts adapted from and developing the marxist traditions of thinking.

Here’s an example, “Deadpool Playing Myth: An Analysis of the "Secondary Narrative" in Deadpool's Promotional Images,” which is the title of an actual Master’s thesis at the Cultural Studies department of Queen’s University.

Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have plenty to learn from such an analysis in the art of narrative creation using meta-fiction in marketing communication. But it’s difficult to make the jump from here to a new economic system and political morality.

Because Laclau and Mouffe were talking primarily about social movements of the Global South and of different minoritarian and sub-altern populations across the world. Here we see a problem of method – you can’t really participate in such social movements when you live in a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.

So what can you do to build a social movement from a professor’s office?

The Impotent Liberal VI: Friends and Enemies, Research Time, 04/01/2017

When the influential political figures of your time are sociopathic
provocateurs of political and racist extremism for fun and profit,
a dedication to tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints won't be
quite adequate to deal with this mess.

Continued from last post . . . Like I said when I started this series more than a week ago, liberal democracy has a dangerous vulnerability.

The philosophy’s dedication to total freedom of thought, speech, and expression for all creates a space of tolerance for those who are dedicated to erasing freedom of thought, speech, and expression.

That old question of toleration of the intolerant plagues modern liberalism. I remember it being an issue going back as far as John Stuart Mill. Though I want to revisit his argument itself this year, I remember it basically as being the conviction that self-contradictory stances like arguing for intolerance on an omni-tolerant platform would fail to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas.

About that, John . . .

The free market of ideas was one of the original guiding ideas behind, for example, the founders of Twitter making their platform completely unrestrained. Free speech was sacrosanct, and must be protected at all costs.

The result? Twitter has become a training ground for white nationalists. And the company culture remains completely unwilling, unable, and incompetent at getting rid of them.

The culture of free speech without the restraint of moral respect has made the simple act of telling an obnoxious prick to shut up and go away into a form of censorship and oppression.

Lindy West wrote a deserved lambast of Twitter for its refusal and
inability to curb the Nazis among its user base. But if your approach
to politics is fundamentally about conflict avoidance, someone who
advocates tolerance loudly will be lumped into the same category
as the Nazis – someone who stokes conflict.

The principle of totally free speech rests on a premise that everyone is redeemable by reason and discourse. Reality has convinced me that this premise is not true. We may be able to influence a society as a whole in a progressive, freer direction. But there are many (not a lot, but enough) individuals who are utterly broken beyond repair.

They are racist, sexist conspiracy theorists who believe that the expression of another’s rights and freedoms actually oppress them. For example, men who believe that it is an act of anti-democratic censorship to prevent him from screaming rape threats and ethnic slurs at his family members.

So we have to take a key lesson from Laclau and Mouffe to heart – antagonism is central to politics. Opposition and conflict – rooted in the concepts that define fundamentally our very identities – are the processes that bind our societies together.

Because our societies are constituted through struggles. Human society develops by diversifying – left to our own devices, we create new kinds of identity. We differentiate ourselves.

Sometimes, those struggles are constructive. They build relationships between communities in a society that help inform each other and their wider neighbours about their mutual humanity.

But all these struggles come with conflict. Conflict between systemically or historically disadvantaged groups and a mainstream dominant class – black civil rights activists and whites who don’t even notice that anything is wrong.

"We have got onto slippery ice where there is
no friction and so in a certain sense the
conditions are ideal, but also, just because
of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction."
Ludwig Wittgenstein as political philosopher?
Terribly out of context, but maybe needed.

Conflict between different demographics who each have seemingly intractable problems – Christian fundamentalists and reproductive choice activists.

Conflict between groups disadvantaged in different ways as their various members succeed and fail to understand each other – the countless, messy, tense alliances between black, Muslim, gay, women, and trans activists.

Liberalism has an admirable utopian vision because it’s of a world without conflict. Where every fight is settled with calm, friendly, rational reasoning. It’s a beautiful ideal but profoundly realistic.

There’s an intense fear of conflict underlying this vision – the notion that any open antagonism in society will tear our communities apart. It’s not that this can never happen. But conflicts that rip societies to bloody, radioactive messes are rare and especially intense.

Most of the time, we all exasperatedly yell at each other about our differences in how we should live. Most of the time, that’s how we form our different identities. It’s how we each figure out and become who we are. Conflict isn’t just a means of breakdown and collapse – it’s the primal productive force of human thought, society, and morality.

A philosophy that can’t grapple with the reality of conflict will – no matter how many real political parties it inspires – always remain in some fundamental way in an imagined ideal. When the rubber hits the road, those ideals alone can’t go anywhere.

A utopia that can’t honestly and authentically understand the power and necessity of conflict will be as useful as frictionless shoes on ice.

The Impotent Liberal III: The Only Possibility is Nothing, Composing, 22/12/2016

This is a Composing post. An extremely Composing post if you know what I mean.

So the previous post was very rooted in real-world concerns – trying to understand what tendencies in the liberal conception of how to do politics made it vulnerable to fascism.

A perennial topic in political philosophy since about 1945. It’s waxed and waned in and out of prominence over the decades. But somebody was always thinking about it. Hannah Arendt did, for example. Now Arendt scholars and more original thinkers she’s influenced think about it too.

No, I can't think of any reasons in contemporary politics why we should
be worried about liberalism's weaknesses in the face of reactionary
authoritarian movements. Why do you ask?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe think about it from time to time in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Reading that book over the past little while encouraged me to think about it. There seem to be some pretty big reasons for thinking about it in politics today.

Yet despite its weaknesses, the liberal idea expresses a pure and profound drive among humanity to be free. How we live out our desires for freedom may change over the generations. But the desire can’t be restrained – if it ever really was in the first place.

And on an individual level, that’s the problem with desire. Desire has no necessary ending point – just contingent, often reactive, developments. It keeps chugging along, fuelling activity until something cuts it off.

Some other demand or desire gets in the way, or its own activity starts to change the world so that it becomes more difficult, or outright impossible. With the desires that constitute societies from individual actions, it’s usually other people that block or shut down our desires.

Political activity is the management of all the desires of everyone in a community for constructive ends. Maybe that community is simply a family, maybe it’s a country of millions, or a planet of billions. People jockey for power, respect, and happiness. No matter the scale, this is human life.

Politics at a family level rarely gets out of control. Even when it does, it’s usually only people in the families themselves who are hurt or killed. Same with small communities and small concerns. Scale this up to a planetary level and you’re potentially dealing with nuclear war and totalitarianism.

This year's American Presidential campaign
saw genuinely powerful appeals to a utopian
vision for freedom. Yet those to whom those
visions don't appeal often misunderstand
them. Pictured here is what
conservatives believe is the average Bernie
Sanders supporter.

Totalitarianism and oppression are major problems with any kind of utopianism. It’s the single vision and direction, imposed on a whole society through state control. Forcing a utopia on the world always has that result.

Yet our utopianism is bound up in our desires for freedom – we conceive of our utopias as the perfect society. A union of the cities of the divine and the mortal. The messiah complex in all of humanity. The positive programs of any utopian vision turned into a political program and state policy is a single prescription for freedom – the society where we will all be free.

But that freedom is false, because totalitarian imposition imposes a single vision of freedom on society. And humanity is a complexifying creature. We always make things more complicated for our society because we’re always drifting toward creating new ways to live, new priorities, new identities, new desires.

This is how reading Laclau and Mouffe got me thinking through this problem. They critique traditional marxism for its premise that industrial advancement will simplify society into two antagonistic classes. But the continuing development of industry and technology actually encourages people to become more complex.

We develop new identities – or become more conscious of desires that have always been part of our society, see how they’re typically suppressed, and bring them out into the light to celebrate their difference.

Cultures merge, new sexualities and genders develop. New social classes and communities develop from new professions and work cultures.

Using the state (or any kind of military-police institution) to impose a single vision of the free society on a whole community of people is the most blatant and horrible oppression imaginable.

So is it even possible to think in utopian terms about politics? To imagine some setup for society that would maximally free us as well as be peaceful?

I think the liberal idea is actually best suited for this task. Because the utopia of a liberal isn’t strictly negative – like a radical libertarian’s reactive, paranoid guard against state activity or control. And it isn’t positive either – like the white nationalist’s dream of a uniform ethno-state.

Liberal philosophy contains the only utopia worth having. A utopia that has no content. Nothing to impose. Nothing to oppress on people. Just the freedom of space itself.

You might be asking: What the fuck does that mean? Well, . . . To Be Continued

The Impotent Liberal II: Knowing Our Enemy, Research Time, 20/12/2016

Continued from last post . . . And I literally mean life and death. As in – people who want to kill you.

How to deal with people who want to kill you was typically a common feature in political philosophy. It’s there in the discipline’s most canonical text – Plato’s Republic considers a basic building block of society the class of warriors.

Liberalism embodies a beautiful idea, given the violent world where we live. Of course, I’m not speaking comprehensively about liberalism – a massive and complicated tradition of political thinking and institution-building.

But that beautiful idea – the most beautiful in the liberal tradition – is that notion of equal rights for all. The principle that everyone should be free to think, believe, live, and do as they please. The only limitation is that no one should harm each other.

Yes, this is most definitely what you call real antagonism.

When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe talk about enemies, it sounds jarring to someone raised in a liberal society. They talk about antagonism – the social forces and tensions that make enemies of people – as a fundamental element of society.

What is an enemy? The definition is unforgiving. It goes beyond the racism of disgust, by a long way. My enemy is those people whose presence in my society prevent me from being true to myself. You feel kept from your true potential simply because these other people are around in your society, your country.

Are you having trouble picturing that? It’s the kind of feeling that motivates Matthew Heimbach to envision a nation-state where only white Christians would even be allowed to live. Which he’s done on a small scale with his organization’s hamlet in Paoli, Indiana.

Racializing nationalism is the ideology of a drive to exile or eradicate an entire other category of people from your life. It’s bad enough when one group of people feel this about another, and it’s not reciprocated. Imagine the constant terror of both partners wanting to dance this dance.

Two groups of people, a substantial majority of whom hate each other to the point of frothing for genocide. And the rest may not froth, but they’re happy to go along for the ride and would be glad to be rid of the bastards.

Only a few dissenters. Barely a whisper of social conscience. Easy to ignore.

What people do to each other in the name of their ideological utopias
is absolutely horrifying.

That kind of antagonism is – thankfully – rare. For all our sakes, we should prevent this antagonism from developing. Integrate communities with many ethnicities all sharing the same neighbourhood. Cultivate an interest in exploring different cultures – Korean dudes stopping for dinner at the Ethiopian restaurant before the German techno party.

Liberal societies have come up with a lot of excellent ways to create that world where there are no enemies. Definitely, not everyone does them very well. Sometimes, a society or a government’s nationalist leanings outweigh their commitment to openness.

When you start to think, “This is a Christian country,” “a Muslim country,” “a black country,” or “a white country.” And not the only label that matters to a liberal – “This is a free country.”

Everyone can be free. That means no one need be my enemy. Yet here’s an enemy staring me down and calling for my death. And I didn’t do anything to provoke it.*

* Or did I? And if it was my government and I had no genuine idea what the hell’s been going on around the world for the last 70 years? Do you think the average person ever consents to any of the horrible shit different governments do to people around the world? No one runs this stuff by us in a referendum. It’s sold to us. Realpolitik is horrifying no matter who does it. What matters is striking back at the ones who actually harmed you. Not some repairman in Topeka or Mosul who barely cares about politics. The ones who give the orders. A bit of a rant there.

The knowledge that freedom really is universal gives the liberal hope. Hope that no one need be anyone’s enemy. That hope can blind a society to genuine hatred. . . . To be continued

The Impotent Liberal I: My Arms Are Open! Research Time, 19/12/2016

“I may disagree with everything you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!”

One of the world’s oldest memes of fundamental liberal principles. It’s explicitly about free speech rights. But the right to free speech has implications that reach much more profound corners of human life than our rights to speak and promote our ideas.

The right to free speech means that all ideas are welcome in public conversation. That means you have to welcome the speaker as well – if they’re a partner in your public conversation, they’re part of your society.

The argument goes like this. There are no expressions or ideas that a
free society can never accept. But values based on such horrifying
hatred as white supremacy is utterly unacceptable. Can a democratic
society survive without rejecting Richard Spencer?

So the right to free speech implies – at least potentially – total inclusion in society. And that’s a fantastic idea. It’s the foundation of the ideal of world peace. And world peace is the liberal democratic idea taken to its most utopian ideal – so utopian that it could be spoken by an aging hippie smoking a spliff watching the sunset.

Here's the problem. And I’m far from the first one to say this. Hell, it comes up in nearly every philosophy class when people discuss freedom of speech. Someone enters this community where everyone is included and everyone can speak their mind. And this person says what’s on their mind.

He says that a huge chunk of the people in this open society shouldn’t be allowed to speak their minds, live in our society, or maybe even exist at all. He starts talking about how women shouldn’t work or speak, that hispanics should be deported, Muslims be imprisoned, Jews forced to Israel, and blacks repatriated to African countries.

In other words, into this liberal paradise where everyone is included and everyone can speak and think as they wish pops a white nationalist. Richard Spencer, Jim Dowson, David Duke, or Matthew Heimbach.

This is an old problem for liberal thinkers. And it’s so obvious a problem that it gets into introductory political philosophy classes as a fallback topic. How does a regime of tolerance deal with the intolerant?

Jim Dowson founded the racist white supremacist organization Britain
First, but left a few years ago and founded the white nationalist
Patriot News Network. This is a major source of pro-Trump memes
and propaganda throughout 2016.

Thing is, I don’t think I’ve seen a single philosophy class where the discussion didn’t just leave this question kind of hanging. There are arguments that, to be true to your principle, you have to include everyone – including the intolerant. And you just have to fight their against their arguments in the marketplace of ideas as hard as they fight for them.

You know what I think? How about “bullshit.” I used to believe in this argument, but two things turned me against it. One was the last couple of years in Europe and North America, when violently racist political movements have sprung up in pretty much every major country of the ostensibly liberal democratic West.

The term ‘marketplace of ideas’ was first developed in Victorian England. When John Stuart Mill wrote about this, public discourse was conducted in long, rambling, complex arguments. Even advertisements were full pages of text, complicated arguments for why you should buy this brand of rainboot over any other.

I don’t have to tell you the media doesn’t work that way today. So we can’t exactly argue about the idiocy of white supremacy as a moral philosophy. We have to fight using memes, sharable content, and social media organizing. Because those are the media weapons of white supremacy.

Liberal argument and tolerance alone can’t handle these people. Because a regime of universal tolerance will literally accept everyone. It even has to accept the viewpoints in its society of the people who want to reject damn near everyone.

Not exactly the nuanced, calm consideration of detailed
arguments that Mill envisioned in his 'marketplace of
ideas.'

Well, we can’t accept the existence of those people in our society. We have to eject racists and sexists. We have to reject white nationalism if we want to defend our liberal, democratic values.

Doesn't that make for a hypocritical liberalism? That we’ll tolerate everything but intolerance? Doesn’t that mean we fail to tolerate literally everything?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe get to this in the most dense part of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. They identify it as the fundamental weakness of liberalism – liberal thinking twists itself into knots over whether they should tolerate violent intolerance.

And we shouldn’t. Of course, this is the centre of a major critique of liberal thinking and politics. Yes, this is going to take a while to unpack. Yes, I’m going to do it here.

But holy shit, it’s important because the ascent of white nationalism to state power is a major political issue in Western society.

Liberalism can’t deal with enemies. Dealing with your enemies is the most important part of politics. Literally life and death. . . . To be continued

Recognize People’s Real Power, Research Time, 15/12/2016

You know, back when I started this blog, I knew a lot of its posts would follow the research I was doing for Utopias. And one of the first declarations I made in my historical research was that, even though I knew I’d engage with some works in the marxist tradition, I was no marxist.

Reading Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the landmark 1980s work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I’m even more convinced of my non-marxism.

Here's an idea that was really prominent in the history of marxism. Not just the academic marxist scholarship – I’m talking about the early 20th century, when the biggest demographic of marxism was political activists and revolutionary radicals.

People's demands can change their whole society. It's called politics.

This is the idea they criticize pretty robustly: That capital totally dominates labour conditions. In other words, the people, organizations, and broader social forces that own, control, and express a society’s sources of wealth controls its labour conditions too.

The concept is connected with traditional marxism’s social, political, and economic determinism. The macro-level structure of society entirely determines all the conditions and movements that are part of it. Society’s superstructure is its only agency.

Labour, meanwhile, isn’t an activity. That would imply that it has agency. Work, according to the tradition, is a commodity – labour-power. You can negotiate the value of your work as a wage, but work’s only feature is its applications, what a boss sends you to do.

Laclau and Mouffe rip this concept apart, and they do it as part of a sustained attack on the entire marxist tradition – both in the theory and in the activism, which until only the last few decades were two sides of the same movement. That attack is uncovering and tearing down a recurring error in marxist thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the world.

The tradition ignores the contingency of history – sees only the logical necessity of theoretical argument and is blind to the messy dynamism of life.

In this context, the tradition ignores how it wasn’t just capitalist society’s superstructure changing according to abstract internal laws of motion that determines labour conditions. Labour conditions are the product of dynamic struggle between working people and the large conglomerates and elite business leaders who employ them.

In 19th century Europe, the children’s rights movement took kids out of dangerous, dehumanizing factory work. In the early 20th century, the union movement won restrictions on the working day’s and week’s length.

Ernesto Laclau and his partner Chantal Mouffe were two figures in the
group that brought ecological ways of thinking to the philosophical
tradition in complex, multidimensional ways. Their academic roots in
marxist studies made them two of the most explicitly political in that
movement.

Today, workers are changing the conditions of labour through activism again. Business leaders aim to casualize and destabilize all employment through models like the gig economy and the sharing economy. So workers are building organizations that network among each other to pool financial and knowledge resources – essentially a union of contractors.

Organizations like the Urban Worker Project in Ontario, which is developing to look a bit more like a medieval guild than a modern labour union.

Where business leaders want to drive their labour costs lower and lower, workers are organizing to keep their wages fair. And that fairness is in reference to the actual cost of living in their cities. The continent-wide Fight For $15 movement is the spearhead organization here.

These are political movements that have the power to condition and entirely remake economic relationships in society. Recognizing their real power in the world is a fatal critique of traditionally orthodox marxist thinking.

These arguments are all so simple when you think about them that I find it weird that there are orthodox marxists left anymore.

Out of Many III: Politics Is Identity and Always Was, Research Time, 09/12/2016

Continued from previous . . . The talk of the liberal internet in the shadow of Trump’s election victory is that it was all the fault of identity politics. SJW culture and its obnoxious tone of anti-racism drove all their potential allies away.

Bernie Sanders himself, the patron saint of America’s lost causes of social democracy, has said it’s time for his country’s progressive political movements to move beyond identity politics.

All through the campaign year, Bernie Sanders was continually depicted
in the media as tone-deaf on racism issues, and as constantly
downplaying its importance relative to the white working class. But
the popular misinterpretation of his identity politics remarks is just a
lazy hot take that picks up the same, boring thread of critique.

Mark Lilla wrote a now-famous op/ed piece in the times arguing that the focus on justice for discriminated minorities distracts from the economic struggles of white Americans. If we focus on the argument, so it goes, working to correct racial inequality alienates poor whites, and that economic dignity for all must be a progressive’s only priority.

It’s an incredibly poor argument, though that doesn’t prevent the chattering classes from believing it. Or at least repeating the argument so much that it becomes a horrible common sense belief.

The perfect rejoinder to this argument was Sanders himself, in the full body of his essay and speech. As well as this piece from the New York Times, that a fair economy and an end to personal, cultural, and institutional racism is the ultimate goal of justice.

A deeply fair society where everyone in the full diversity of humanity is our sibling and friend. That would be a wonderful society.

Yet we can’t get the intelligentsia of our chattering classes to admit this. Mark Lilla argues that we should leave the fight against racism and sexism behind in the name of healing our rift with reactionary whites. Jordan Peterson argues that racism and sexism are barely even real enough to bother talking about.

I even came across an argument that racial and gender justice advocacy only advances according to a kind of status hierarchy of the most radical extremism. Progressive activist Germaine Greer wasn’t vilified because a wider LBGTQ community no longer tolerates the hostility to trans people that she’s always expressed.

Essays like that one I linked on the "status hierarchy" of SJW
extremism feel like longer versions of juvenile, sarcastic memes
like this one. Their critique just as meaningful.

No, it’s much more sensible to say that you make more ridiculous and bizarre demands as a pissing contest of gender liberty extremism. “I know 72 gender pronouns and you only know 37 – you fucking fascist!”

There is a strong, powerful, and complex tradition of philosophy that can defend the call for actual justice in the world from this contempt. It’s the tradition of radical democracy – the political philosophy that conceives of human nature as the drive to grow more and more complex. And it wants social institutions to encourage that explosion of diversity.

Names to read are those I’ve been looking through lately – Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière. Their work since the 1980s has built a concept of human nature that embraces our entire species’ incredible variety, and opposes the injustices of oligarchy and poverty, as well as race and gender oppression along all vectors.

Writing before the 21st century’s resurgence of nationalism, they first opposed the conservative liberal consensus on the nature of truth and reason. The Enlightenment conception of reason that’s become our mainstream is the reason of a perfectly consistent universality.

There is one and only one truth, it is coherent and real, you speak the truth when your words correspond to what is true. This concept of human nature says there is one perfect model of human existence, and conformity to this model approaches perfection.

Although their focus on philosophy of science, the arts, and humanities
traditions themselves tends to nudge them out of what's recognized as
the community of political philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari have central roles in the radical democracy tradition. They
built the ontology underlying the politics and ethics.

The first cracks in that idea was around when Frantz Fanon wrote that such a perfect model looked pretty white, male, and European. But it doesn’t end there.

Humanity is a difference engine. We’ve survived the catastrophes we have not because we form hostile tribes and conform to community moralities. That’s how writers like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land think humanity survives crises. But that’s how humanity kills each other.

Humanity is an inherently creative species. We adapt our cultures to new circumstances and new ways of life so that we can constantly experiment and figure out new ways to live when our world changes out from under us. Our changeability is what makes us such good migrants. Why almost anywhere in the world can be a human habitat.

Our adaptiveness and creativity means that diversity – the most fundamental freedom of democracy, the freedom to be and become whatever you desire – is the core of human strength.

The best identity politics is the politics that embraces and protects that incredible power to become. . . . Actually, it will be continued

Conformity to a Community of Diversity, Research Time, 01/12/2016

I’m going to run through an argument that I’ve gone through quite a few times before, and that I will even more in the future. It’s about the nature of community, particularly the concept of community in radical democracy. So it’ll be pretty important to the ideas of Utopias, and it’s very important to our own political moment.

Here’s an anecdote to start. Right now, my friends Hipster Gogol and Dons the Miner are having a wonderful argument in the comments to my link promoting Hipster Gogol’s classes in activism.

Liberal individualism and communitarianism are viciously co-
dependent in many ways. Consider that the fantasy narrative of
individualism is the rebel from conformity – the hero's triumph requires
that he be the only individual, even though liberal philosophy and
culture aims for everyone to live as self-reliant individuals striking
out on their own paths.

Hipster Gogol works for a southern Ontario water protection group, and Dons the Miner works in the mining industry. It’s the usual kind of head-banging conversation between a conservative who doesn’t want to pay taxes for programs that help poor people, and a left-wing activist.

The Miner’s arguments are purely individualistic. Because he himself isn’t poor or marginalized, he sees no reason why he should pay taxes that fund programs for the benefit of others to whom he has no connection. There’s no fellow-feeling for the members of his community in his arguments.

But there’s also a problem with the opposite, more communitarian way of thinking. It stresses that community can only arise from a common morality, or a common culture.

You’re left with a choice: the radical alienation and mutual hostility of individualism, or cultural uniformity enforced by morality of mutual policing and hostility to difference from inside or outside the group.

If you go to the radical democratic tradition,* you can see a way out of this double bind. One route Chantal Mouffe takes is through a concept of common sense.

Here's another vicious paradox. The right-wing take on progressive
language and communication – which is denounced as political
correctness – is that it's a thought police promoting conformity. Yet
it's a form of language that encourages people to understand and
express real differences.

* Thinkers like Spinoza, Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, and more lately Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.

Common sense has a popular meaning that has nothing to do with this argument at all, sort of. The popular meaning of ‘common sense’ is to tag some ideas as obviously true. To introduce an idea with the phrase, “Of course we all know that . . . . . It’s just common sense!” The everyday intuition.

The most infamous use of this phrase today is the Newspeak of President Trump. For him, common sense is the obviously, intuitively true knowledge of those who are certain of their beliefs – that stop-and-frisk is a useful and important policing technique, that Muslims are inherently violent and anti-American.

I’m talking about the Spinoizist concept of common sense – literally the common knowledge that arises from honest conversations between different people. People of different genders, gender identifications, classes, sexualities, racial groups, religions, ethnicities, nationalities. Conversations that open your mind to other possible histories and experiences – different ways to be a person.

Radical democracy is an approach to building your community that flows from earnestly understanding and embracing human differences. So radical democracy preserves the individuality and room for difference that’s so important for liberal individualism.

Radical democrat (who spoke as an ontologist
and philosopher of science) Gilles Deleuze.

And because you’re literally reaching out to your neighbours and compatriots to understand their personal journeys, perspectives, and values, you achieve what communitarians want as well. A strong, deeply bonded community.

But it isn’t a community that comes from strictly enforcing moral and cultural conformity. Conservatives, particularly Trump and Trumpists, often accuse progressives of being morality police, enforcing their view of the truth to the exclusion of others.

The community is synthesized into a unity. But it’s a unity from differences. If I can get technical,** Deleuze called it a disjunctive synthesis.***

** And not just pretentious, like usual.

*** He originally developed the concept in the context of philosophy of mathematics, but he was able to work out an abstract structure for it that let it apply to particular acts of thinking in many different domains. The unity that arises from communication among differences.

Radical democracy constructs a community from disjunctive syntheses – the unity from differences in communication with each other.

Will the Liberal Finally Die or Regenerate? Research Time, 29/11/2016

Life has gotten a bit busy, so my Class review will be late by a day or two. Judging by Phil Sandifer’s review of the episode, I’m not missing on much artistically, but it will probably be a fascinating shit show of crazy ideas flying all over the place.

Such things have their place in science-fiction, and in the world of Doctor Who as well.

But today, I want to follow on from yesterday’s post about the CBC controversy brewing. Right now, Canada is experiencing a white nationalist movement, just as in Trump’s triumph in America and the growing movements in Europe.

You might not think so because of Justin Trudeau’s leadership. How can there be a resurgence of political racism in Canada when we re-elected the party with contemporary multiculturalism at its core, led by a fresh-faced social progressive?

Canadian Liberal Party rhetoric challenges the destructive, conservative
tendencies of our society, while falling in line with those tendencies in
their governance and actions. With every generation, the party has to
work hard to find a new way to pull the same old slight of hand. Justin
is the regeneration that continues the traditional theme.

My answer reveals a lot about the decadence and the promise of liberalism as an ethic and a political philosophy. It’ll just take a few paragraphs to work through.

Justin Trudeau himself is a frightfully normal Liberal Party politician. He campaigned as a standard-bearer for social progressivism and institutional change to the Canadian state after the paranoid doldrums of the Harper decade. He’s ended up a new mix on traditional Liberal Party hypocrisy, walking back all his promises that would actually change Canadian institutions and economic relationships.

Trudeau will dominate Canadian state politics for the next three years at least, probably longer. But the white nationalist movement has its own voice in federal politics in Kellie Leitch.

Canadian white nationalism is specific to the Canadian situation. But a white nationalist reactionary movement tends to emerge in response to a wave of activism for formerly excluded people to be included as full members of a society.

America’s largely revolves around the growing social clout of black and Hispanic minorities, and activists from those communities who seek material equality as people and as cultures.

The different European white nationalist movements respond to the demands of immigrant groups for inclusion. They first emerged when the groups were from the former colonies, but picked up popular speed when the mass influx of Muslim refugees from the three/four wars* of the Middle East began.

* The Libyan Civil War, the Saudi-Iran proxy war for control of Yemen, and depending on how you divide the conflict, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad, and the Syrian-Iraqi war on ISIS.

But we don't live in an era when traditional ways of thinking and acting
can maintain and defend our democracy and our freedoms. Modern
nationalism isn't the hoary old terror of Stormfront and greasy Hitler
hair. White nationalism's voices today are young, dynamic politicians
whose charisma could challenge Trudeau's own. Like Germany's
Franke Petry, leader of the Alternative for Deutschland Party, on
track to unseat the tired centrist-liberal Christian Democrat Party of
Angela Merkel.

All these white nationalist movements emerged and strengthened in reaction to social movements that challenged old and ancient racializing hierarchies in their societies.

In America, it was a renewed desire of the former slave class for social inclusion – the demand that black lives matter. In Europe, it was the demand of Muslim people to become Europeans, when Europe has been defined since the early second millennium in opposition to Islamic civilization.

Canada? I still have some work to do tracing the ideas, but my initial hypothesis is that Canada’s conservative culture started to embrace white nationalism in response to the Indigenous cultural renaissance. The Canadian state was founded – in part, but in essential part – as institutions to remove Indigenous people from political life.

Lock them away in reserves, in rural areas where no one goes. The first major crime of the Canadian state was the suppression of francophone Indigenous people in the first mass settling of the territories of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. State-sponsored genocide continued through the residential schools.

The last five years have seen the recognition of these crimes, and the growing visibility of continuing racism. When an elected official in Saskatchewan reacts to the murder of a young Indigenous man by declaring that the shooter should have killed all Colten Boushie's friends so there’d be no witnesses? He got in trouble, but he was speaking for his constituents.

Chantal Mouffe writes in praise of liberalism because of one important aspect of its philosophy – the possibility that everyone can be included in a society, no matter how different they are. That community can arise from difference, not from conformity to some common moral, religious, or ethnic being.

I may sound alarmist when I say this, but now is a time when alarmism
is entirely reasonable. As Canadians, we have to accept that a not
insignificant number of our fellow Canadians think it's not only
morally acceptable to kill Indigenous people, but that it's a national
imperative to suppress, marginalize, and drive Indigenous people to
their cultural and literal death.

In the wake of Trump’s election, there’s been a lot of chatter among self-identified liberals that maybe it’s time to move on from “identity politics.” To move away from provoking the white people who are threatened by the racially marginalized seeking inclusion.

Because mainstream liberalism sees racism as a matter of individual’s or group’s shared beliefs about people, it’s often blind to more structural material oppression. Yet liberalism’s drive to include difference requires confronting and changing those systematic institutional structures that perpetuate racializing inequities.

If liberalism and liberals accept and reconcile their politics with nationalism, liberal politics will die. If liberal thinkers and leaders find ways to fight nationalism – to welcome the different and find strength in that diversity and bravery in confronting fundamental structures in society? It will regenerate into a more powerful philosophy and a more peaceful world.

Saving the Liberal Brand, Research Time, 25/11/2016

I’m not talking about the Liberal Party here in Canada, though I might spin out a Sunday post if I have time this weekend about the debate that’s been stirred this week on the future of Canadian public broadcasting. That’s for another time.

Also, I want to see the next few days of yelling in the media about it, to see what new trajectories of public conversation emerge from it. Where our popular opinion seems to be going.

Liberalism as a program of practical governance is in crisis. We're seeing
what I hope is the climax of a process of decadence. Liberalism's
superficial public image of social progressivism is an increasingly
inadequate response to real political conflicts and problems.

I’m talking right now about my relationship with liberalism as a political philosophy and broader social morality. And how it’ll function in Utopias. It can mean many things in our popular culture and conversations. But I’ve talked a lot about liberalism on this blog.

Specifically, think about everything I’ve written about Robert Nozick, Freidrich Hayek, and other elements of the libertarian tradition. Liberalism as politics today is in a weird, fallen, broken state.

Libertarian thinking is the last branch of liberal politics with any idealism or popular energy at all. Every other path of mainstream liberal politics is either hopelessly corrupt or is so wedded to muddling consensus thinking that it can’t deal with true challenges.

You know, like mainstream centrist political parties. Take the Democratic Party in America as an example of corruption. Their leadership is a self-absorbed closed circle of professional electioneers and party staffers.

The Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton, Donna Brazile, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is so obsessed with their high-level power brokerage that their entire grassroots electoral machine has collapsed.

This years Presidential election in America was the picture-perfect
narrative of liberalism's collapse in the face of nationalist politics. Hillary
Clinton's public image as the principle-free middle ground of inoffensive
good and stable governance (at the best of times) proved inadequate to
the rise of nationalism in the United States.

The federal Liberal Party in Canada is in a similarly hypocritical position, even though they’re in a dominant position. Justin Trudeau and his party was elected on a platform of socially progressive values. But they’re turning away from all of the most meaningful reforms to the Canadian state that they promised. As well, they’re continuing the destructive fiscal and military policies of the Harper years.

Mainstream liberal political thinking also depends on a principle that can’t work as politics, especially in a volatile, dangerous time like the 2010s. That principle is reconciliation at all costs.

This is an idea I found at the heart of a book of essays by Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political. They were written over the 1990s, criticisms of mainstream liberal politics at a time when liberal capitalism was so triumphant in global politics that some called it the end of history itself.

The end of fundamental conflicts over the nature of the human project. We had settled on our human project, and it was called liberal democratic capitalism. Of course, that didn’t work out for many reasons. One of them is this fundamental flaw in the practical actions of liberal politicians.

The common joke today is that the far left is the side obsessed with political correctness, and that political correctness is nothing but the profusion of feathery technical talk, replacing more ordinary language for discussing race and gender. And the punchline is that all this is to avoid upsetting people.*

Liberal politics can't really deal with radical nationalist politics like the
politicized racism of Richard Spencer and the alt-right movement.
Liberalism in state politics is about smoothing away and minimizing
differences for the sake of co-existence. Yet the only co-existence
possible with alt-right nationalism – which explicitly calls for
ethnically cleansing the United States of non-white people – is to
accept its program, but to smile while you deport millions.

* No, not as a long-running experiment in different ways to talk to each other and live together in ways that don’t cause systematic discrimination. That would just be silly.

The irony is that this is what mainstream liberal political principles are all about. The principles that drove Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s economic policy approaches – the “Third Way” between socialism and piracy capitalism which ended up enabling the worst piracy capitalism in human history.

Smooth away differences, goes the mainstream liberal philosophy. Split the world into the public realm of politics and the private realm of individual autonomy. Identify every piece of identity, ideology, and idealism that could conceivably cause conflict between people, then put it in that private realm.

Leave the public realm, where legitimate political discussions happen, to the topics where people generally agree. Here’s a typical example of good liberal public politics. Business is good, and while we can disagree over which policies make for a productive business environment, those technical differences over stuff like interest rates and securities law won’t ever become existential threats.

The decadent liberal politics of today is the pursuit of omni-partisan consensus. The only legitimate mainstream political voices become those who already agree on enough fundamental principles that conflict becomes impossible. But this isn’t peace and justice in society. It’s sweeping problems under the rug.

Never thought something as arcane and dull-as-shit as securities law would become an existential crisis in your society? How about when your securities laws that were produces of that omni-partisan consensus become the conditions for what was almost a global economic collapse? Like eight years ago.

We democrats will need to engage, refute, and fight the ideas of radical
nationalism. Which means we have to study radical nationalists, know
them better than they know themselves so we can learn best how to
defeat this force forever. If only I could find an English translation of
Aleksandr Dugin without ending up on a watch list. I only want to find
it so I can know our enemy.

The liberalism of omni-partisan consensus can’t even deal with problems that come up in a country’s arcane and technical financial laws. It’s completely fucked trying to deal with radical nationalism, mass scale racist targeting of war refugees, or religious fundamentalism.

All these movements fundamentally disagree with consensus liberalism because they refuse to accept its standards for consensus.

Nationalism refuses to accept that notions of ethnic identity have no place in politics. A huge wave of desperate war refugees puts the entire consensus about citizenship and who deserves the care of the state into question. Religious fundamentalism explicitly politicizes the demands of people’s divine laws.

Liberalism is bankrupt in the face of these problems. We can see that obviously now that all these problems have erupted throughout our society. So it’s interesting to read these essays from Mouffe and see her making these exact criticisms at the moment of liberalism’s apparent triumph.

What’s necessary are looking at how she discovered a liberalism that can actually take on our current challenges of extremism and justice that were embryonic 20 years ago.

I’m going to get into this idea over the next few posts.

Where Nothing Ever Changes, A History Boy, 17/11/2016

So I’ve been reading this book of essays from the end of the 20th century by Chantal Mouffe. The book she co-wrote with her husband, the masterwork of political theory Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, is next on my reading list.

The Return of the Political is a collection I’ve had on my shelf for a while. I bought it more than a decade ago, when I first discovered philosophy as a student and spent that summer excitedly picking up whatever on the bookstore shelves appealed to me by their covers and blurbs.

Mouffe’s essay collection was one of them, but it didn’t really excite me when I cracked it open back in the early W years. I think because she was such a sober writer, and because many of the debates she was contributing to were confined to a world of academic political theory that I hadn’t yet cracked into.

Now that I have, I find a lot of value in Mouffe’s work. This post is a reflection on some possible reasons why many others don’t.

There’s a short essay in The Return of the Political called “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics.” It functions as a general statement of Mouffe’s stance in the community of feminist philosophers.

She describes a fundamental conflict in feminist philosophy. I’m going to describe it in absurdly simple terms because the general themes are all I want to discuss right now.

One side was the essentialists – thinkers who believed that women had an essential nature as maternal carers, whose inclusion in political and economic life would transform these patriarchal settings with their values.

One side was the postmodernists – those who understood identity, including gender, to be entirely contingent, historically and culturally produced, and so without essential nature and always subject to change. Here, including women in political and economic life had the goal of a general radical transformation of society that would collapse and explode all concepts of gender and sex we believe essential.

Here she was writing in the mid-1990s, and I still saw feminist philosophy being taught to undergrads as embodying the same key distinction. Different compromises were made, but this is how the academic institutions I lived in taught young students what feminism was.

It’s as if there were a broad agreement across academic philosophy that essentialism vs postmodernism* was the essence of feminism. So the essentialists win, but only at the meta-level?

* If you want to take a couple of references, here are some I’ll pull out of my arse. Essentialism vs postmodernism => Carol Gilligan vs Judith Butler.

Thinking on this yesterday frustrated me about my time in academics. As I see material politics shifting so radically so constantly, always losing and regaining and losing again its stability – It annoys me to see academic discussions staying to the same old sides, at least at the fundamental levels.

There have been whole generations of political philosophers after, for example, John Rawls. But Rawls has only inspired Rawlsians – not other thinkers in the liberal philosophical tradition to become Rawls’ equal.

Careers are made in academia by picking an established side and arguing for it in your own way. Yet the great works that provide the names-turned-adjectives which are their labels largely inspire commentators and advocates. Not other great works.

Mouffe’s own solution to the essentialism-postmodern impasse in feminism is one that I very much agree with. If I can put it in my own words, feminism is the jet fuel for the liberation vectors that destroy all the forms of oppression that flow from patriarchal social structures.

So you get the changeability and flux in the world that’s at the centre of the postmodern tradition. But the political culture motivated by a morality of care is a very important one of the many ideals that guide the path of those liberations.

That way of thinking has much more potential than simply hunkering down and defending a pair of -isms against each other. Yet it’s easier to make a career in academia by picking a side and defending it than pointing out a way forward, beyond the impasse.

So we’re stuck deep in the trenches, never seeing the light of the sun.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites IV: The Exclusion of Imprisonment, Research Time, 10/11/2016

Continued from last post . . . When I say the fundamental anti-democratic force in society is the police, I'm not necessarily referring to actual police institutions. Though most of them these days aren't exactly all that impressive in their commitment to the rights of the people.

When I say the word 'police' in this context, it helps to think of this as a verb. When police forces solve crimes, help prosecute violent offenders, and actually protect the people of their communities, they’re public servants. They aren’t policing in this sense.

Policing as the enforcement of rules is a brutal means of social control. It's the social control of direct violent intimidation and fear. The spectacle of the tank driving down the street, the line of riot police armoured so heavily as they walk through what was once a thriving market district looking more like robot soldiers than people.

I don't remember ever thinking that guy with the cameo in Home Alone II
is going to be President of the United States one day. Even though I
wasn't even in puberty yet. Definitely not.

One very dark bright light in the victory of Donald Trump for the American Presidency is that I doubt he'd build a secret police institution. His moves to crush dissent will be as blatant and visibly in-your-face as Trump’s entire personality and campaign.

Quite a few of my good friends in Toronto are Syrian immigrants, people who've grown up in a state that controlled its population with secret police. So at least the Trump Administration will likely not embrace this essential institution of totalitarianism.

So in a philosophical sense, policing is control by the explicit and open threat of violence. That violence can take many forms, like actual physical beatings, the insidious buzzing of a surveillance state, or the institutionalized destruction of lives through imprisonment and the social exclusion of former convicts.

Policing is the biggest and most bruising stick of all the ways to exclude people from a legitimate place in a society, for the reason that a person doesn’t follow as they should a set of detailed substantive rules of propriety. As a process and a social force, policing in this sense is the essential anti-democratic activity.

If the nature of democracy as a process – the ontology of democracy – is as the struggle for freedom, then in what does that freedom consist? It’s more substantive than the libertarian sense of freedom, which is the mere absence of state coercion (though that’s incredibly important).

And it isn’t the communitarian sense of freedom either. I’ve been reading some very good critical writing on this concept in a collection of essays by Chantal Mouffe that I picked up from my shelves a while ago.

Communitarian conceptions of democratic inclusion requires such a thick, detailed, and essentially static shared morality in a community that they paradoxically end up embracing policing in the name of freedom. Communitarian conceptions of freedom reduce to a strict and detailed set of social rules that are defined as the proper way to be free. And conformity to these rules means you’ve got to start some heavy policing.

No, real democracy is neither of these. It’s the struggle for greater freedom – developing new vectors for liberation and the movement along those directions.

Seen here is a related – but sadly much more literal – example of the
heavy policing we're likely to see over the next four years. Some of
the Trump apologist trolls I've seen in the last while have mocked
progressives' fears of his impulsive, violent tendencies when in
charge of the American state. When I say Trump will likely go to
war, I don't mean war against a foreign country. I mean war on the
people of America.

This is only possible in a society, a network of complex relations between people that, when everything is working as it should, empowers us to develop and progress along liberation vectors. It sounds like the movement toward freedom should tear a community apart if liberation means everyone is creating new ways of life all the time.

In Jacques Rancière’s analysis of this problem, he describes he democratic process as the struggles for including all these proliferating differences in a society’s morality.

People are caught between two possibilities if the choice comes down to liberal or communitarian visions of a free society. Yet each of those two possibilities seem to be parallel visions of the other.

Liberalism leaves us disconnected individuals, little more than a bare life bouncing off other such isolates. Our best hopes for life would be to escape being crushed by our institutions or eaten by our neighbours.

Communitarian conceptions of citizenship and freedom position themselves as the antidote to liberal poverty of the subject’s morality. They are correct that rights can only exist with the real support of a whole community. But bearing rights that a community respects doesn’t require comprehensive moral conformity.

In other words, I don’t have to be the same kind of person as you to respect you, and welcome you to my community. Common identity isn’t the reason to respect someone – it’s simply being a person.

That’s the foundation of democracy.