While the left wants to swing public anger against class targets, some are asking whether it cannot gain some vital added traction by tapping into some of these highly effective themes: immigrants bring wages down; the EU is a capitalist club; trade with China is destroying manufacturing jobs. The top leadership of the British Labour Party swung into unequivocal support of Brexit. In Germany a new movement, Aufstehen, is being launched to rally anti-EU, anti-immigrant sentiment on the left. Similar rumblings come from Denmark, Italy and elsewhere. [...]
But the historical achievement of labour and social democratic parties was precisely to weld these very particularistic solidarities into wider ones – not destroying them but subordinating them within a wider class-based morality of universalism. For most of the 20th century ‘universal’ meant ‘national’. The reason for this was an amalgam of pragmatic reasoning (the nation state was the level at which democracy could be most effectively established) and appeals to solidarities based on blood and soil. The universalist, egalitarian morality of the left stressed the former; exclusionary tendencies of the right, the latter. The precise mix did not matter much while the two could proceed in tandem, but as the nation state has lost its capacity autonomously to govern economic space, the case for insisting on the priority of the nation has leaned more heavily on appeals to blood and soil. Therefore, the right has become the main beneficiary of discomfort with a globalizing world. To share in that, the left has to abandon a universal, egalitarian morality in favour of an exclusionary one, a betrayal of the nobility of its past.
Second, this also means that, far from stealing a piece of the right’s action, all the left achieves by following it on these issues is to legitimise the far right’s message, conspiring with it to tear down the boundaries that the genuine morality of universalism has over the years held the right in check. It is not chance that waves of hate crimes and violence against minorities followed the vote for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the entry of La Lega into the Italian government. The debates around these events made legitimate the denigration of immigrants and other foreign persons and institutions that had been made shameful by decades of the great recoil from everything Adolf Hitler had stood for. Hate is by far the most powerful human emotion, and politically it is the property of the extreme right. It has to be kept down, outside acceptable discourse.
No comments:
Post a Comment