There Is No Substitute For Politics
Everybody knows that things can’t keep going this way. The global economy is deeply dysfunctional. Resources are no longer allocated with anything resembling rationality. Large nations are incapable of fixing their own infrastructure. The economy is increasingly ficticious. The gap between the rich and poor is becoming unsustainable. These are the conditions of civilizational collapse.
Everybody also knows that things aren’t changing. Nothing that happens seems to affect the mechanisms of power. No matter what we do, the system just keeps chugging along. If people got together, if the masses were convinced that change was possible, it could all be turned around. But they’re not, and nobody wants to face this simple, stark fact.
So they turn to substitutes.
For some people, it’s identity. They tell themselves that this or that category of people is the true engine of history. If only more women were in power, everything would be different! But from Thatcher to Merkel to the women now running the military-industrial complex, it makes absolutely no difference. Because “women” are not a political group with a cohesive set of interests, and because changing the face of the system doesn’t change how it functions. People don’t do what they do because they have male or female ideologies, they do so for material reasons. It’s all about the money, and it always will be as long as this economic system persists.
Others turn to culture, even further away from power and government. If only people with their particular ideology could control all the stories we tell, things would change! If only more people from oppressed groups were depicted, the oppression would somehow go away! But again, nothing changes, because all they’re doing is championing the entry of a handful of middle-class representatives of those groups into the upper class, where they will faithfully serve the system that rewarded them. The mechanisms that push us towards collapse remain unchanged.
Climate change is another popular substitute for politics. Here the demand is for emergency laws, for the suspension of democracy (since you can’t convince people). Imaginary wise technocrats to the rescue! Accelerating the authoritarian trends of our society, giving more power to the very same status quo that has ignored climate change for decades despite the evidence, will surely somehow fix the problem.
(Greenpeace, I should note, is itself engaged in selling dirty fossil fuel energy. In case you were wondering where their financial interests lie.)
The election of Donald Trump, a banal huckster whose main difference to his predecessors was his crude aesthetics, provided another source of hope that the system could be changed by some external actor. For some it was Trump himself who would somehow “drain the swamp” even though he was transparently just another swamp-creature himself; for others it was the supervillain their desperate imaginations turned Trump into. A Russian puppet, a fascist, a mastermind about to bring America to its knees! Here was the threat that would suddenly convince everyone to support their cause. Centre-right liberals and alleged socialists suddenly sounded the same. Here was the man whose terrible presence would convince everyone to vote for them forever! Here was the man whose fascist takeover would spur the working class to revolution!
Except the actual response of the working class was “meh.” And Trump came and went and not a whole lot happened. His pathetic attempts to use the same playbook as his opponents by claiming the election was rigged ended up amounting to no more than a handful of clowns causing a public spectacle, an event that simply underscored just how powerless Trump was. This after weeks of reporting about how the government essentially ignored any orders the military and intelligence apparatus found inconvenient.
The obsession with that event, now far in the past, is little more than a desperate attempt to hang on to the imaginary feeling of historical importance that the Trump years had enabled. For four years, every political group had been able to claim that big things are now happening, this is it, this is the moment when people turn to us. And they didn’t. And it all passed. And it amounted to nothing.
Trump has now been superseded by Covid-19 as an imaginary agent of change. Surely now people will see that we’ve been right all along, and join us! After all, the virus has certainly accelerated the decline, and highlighted both how incapable most countries are of investing in their infrastructure, and how they reach for authoritarian measures first.
Convinced that the virus is the magic bullet for the triumph of their ideology, various groups have embraced increasingly hysterical positions in a desperate attempt to get people on their side. Some demand more and more restrictions, more lockdowns, completely failing to understand how sick people are of being isolated, how much they resent having their day-to-day civil liberties stripped away. They mock everyone who is uncomfortable with the idea of having to show their papers to be allowed to enter a shop — or to leave the house. They belittle people who struggle with the impact of an unprecedented period of isolation, of the suspension of social life, even though this has led to countless suicides, and to the horror of people not being allowed to visit their dying loved ones. Even though only a year ago they were claiming that vaccines would never be ready by December 2020, that Trump was lying and any vaccine produced while he was President would likely be fake, they disparage the people who have fallen for the anti-vaccination grifters. A recipe for political catastrophe.
The other side of the coin, meanwhile, is those who see all these problems and embrace the opposite end of the spectrum, dismissing the vaccines as evil pharmacorp products, insisting the virus is harmless and all measures are pointless, mocking people who are worried at all. But though they are more likely to gain some measure of support from a tired and alienated population, this particular set of lies is no magic bullet either, and anyone who thinks that they can attach a real political project to this mix of legitimate concerns, hoaxes, grifts, and outright claptrap is entirely deluded.
At the end of the day, a simple truth remains. If you cannot convince people that a better world is possible, give them a believable idea of what that world looks like, and convince them that your movement or your ideology can actually lead to that world, you will fail. Getting ordinary people on your side is the only measure of success. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can replace actual politics. Not art, not theory, not moralism. Nor can you simply tell people what to do. If you want a different future, and God knows we need one, you have to convince people to help you build it.
