The revolt against reason

[Celerity]

Many have lost all trust in politics, Robert Misik writes. The protests against vaccination and anti-virus rules however turn this into madness.

https://socialeurope.eu/the-revolt-against-reason


‘Soon we shall all know someone killed by vaccination’—an anti-vaccine protest in Switzerland

The diagnosis of a ‘split’ in society is commonplace today—societies are shaken by discord and divisions are intensifying. The claims differ in details but on some basic assumptions there is usually agreement. First, there are increasingly testy disputes, largely along a traditional left-right axis but sometimes deviating from it. ‘Culture wars’ break out over gender issues, racism and anti-racism, immigration and who belongs to the ‘us’—even lifestyles. Pundits talk about societies breaking into hostile ‘tribes’.

There is also a degree of unanimity in the analyses about alienation from the conventional political system—an anger that ‘they are not interested in us at all’—especially in underprivileged segments of the population, including the old working classes but also the marginalised lower middle class and the ‘underclass’. These who are victims of growing insecurity feel that they can no longer rely on solidarity: ‘You can’t count on anyone anymore.’ Many people say ‘I just look out for myself now’ in a depressed, negative individualism. These social milieu are then particularly appealing to right-wing populists and extremists who proclaim: ‘Yes, no one listens to you—but I am your voice.’

Part of the problem?

This is a particular challenge for progressive political parties: the social democrats, the Labour Party, the American Democrats, the vast majority of traditional labour and left-wing movements. On the one hand, left-wing parties have a great deal of sympathy with popular revolts against ruling elites and systems of chronic injustice—indeed, for many decades of their existence they were the bearers of them. Yet, on the other hand, in the eyes of many who turn away in disappointment, they themselves are part of that detested ‘elite’. Even if they—the parties—see themselves as part of the solution, many of their potential voters see them as part of the problem. This is by no means to say that the supporters of right-wing, anti-system parties are primarily part of a working class that has become politically homeless—but they do also come from this group. Those who are under economic pressure, who struggle with job insecurity, who are confronted with stagnating wages and who generally see themselves as ‘losers’ of economic transformations easily feel politically unheard, no longer represented, disrespected and left behind as innocent victims of injustice.

I have analysed all this in my book The False Friends of the Ordinary People, including how right-wing populists appeal successfully to the traditional ‘values’ of the working classes. The left-wing and progressive parties have, of course, already recognised the problem and are responding to it in a wide variety of ways: shifting to the left, managing a gradual course correction or dissolving into hopeless debates about strategy. The fact that the German social democrats went into the recent Bundestag election campaign with the slogan ‘Respect’ is due to this diagnosis, and at least it led to the SPD regaining first place and the chancellorship. It is remarkable that, while different countries on different continents have strikingly different political cultures and traditions, these discourses and rhetorics are astonishing similar. The structural transformation of debate in the public sphere—through the internet, blogs and ‘social media’—of course contributes massively here and yet this is often dramatically underestimated.

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