>Cast a vote for people expressing such views and you back them up. I don't, personally, give a fuck if you're not actively doing it. You are a part of it.
I agree. And similarly if you cast a vote for the other you're part of our treatment of the middle east which really set the stage for the current batch of racists, mass unwarranted surveillance, sweat shops, the increasing wealth-gap etc. etc.
>Xen, I know full well the people voting Brexit weren't voting so because of the economy, they were mainly being racist and scapegoating the 'other'.
I absolutely disagree on this. I believe they are being used to push through a racist agenda and, of course, some are racist, just as some labour/tory/lib dem/whatever voters are - we are a racist society.
I'm not even arguing that they wouldn't espouse some views that we'd find racist. But, again, this didn't come out of nowhere - in the climate of post 9/11 jingoism politicians on the right decided they could win votes with an anti-immigration stance and they could do so without losing votes from the centre if they contextualised it economically. Which is fine (by which I mean unsurprising), it's the centre right being the centre right.
The problem is that, seeing what a populist issue this was, the left (I mean centre left, labour, lib dems) accepted that contextualisation, as did the largely liberal popular media. We've had over a decade of this validation of racist views to which *everyone* is subject - all mainstream parties, the media and people in general have moved to the right in this regard and literally no one in the mainstream has offered an alternative formulation.
A labour politician, for example, will express this stuff with more sophistication and subtlety than your average brexit voter but, really, they're expressing the exact same things.
People voted brexit over the bullshit issue of sovereignty (which, again, the left didn't have the balls to actually argue *against*) and alienation from neoliberalism in general and austerity in particular (which, again, the left didn't meaningfully oppose). The racist stuff is context, not substance, for most.
I want to be clear that I'm not arguing for Trump or Brexit nor that they should be acceptable to *anyone*.
I'm saying that the left has entirely failed. On post 9/11 stuff, on immigration, on the EU and on austerity. The left *should* be offering the disenfranchised many an alternative formulation of what our problems are but they're too shitscared of losing all the middle class votes they won by going the 'third way'. So we've got two parties:
One who favours neoliberal economics and globalism, largely in the pocket of big business, historical record of continuing to widen the wealth gap and is pro-austerity.
And one who favours neoliberal economics and globalism, largely in the pocket of big business, historical record of continuing to widen the wealth gap and is pro-austerity.
All of which either actively hurts or does not meaningfully apply to anyone but business owners and the middle class.
We (you and I and most people here) are privileged as all fuck. We've benefited from (most of) this stuff. Not as much as the super wealthy but enough that we can see it. Some people haven't benefited, or have benefited so little as for it to be insulting. Why *the fuck* should they care that one option is slightly better than the other when that betterness doesn't even meaningfully apply to them? To keep you and I content while we continue to fuck the poor both here and in the rest of the world?
Brexit and Trump offered an opportunity to vote against *that*. Against the whole system. To reject it all. It's not *effective*, of course, because Trump and the brexiteers are just as deep in that bullshit as are the mainstream politicians. They have been sold a false narrative and that was possible because the left abandoned them.
We need fundamental change - you mentioned climate change and that's a prime example - and *no* mainstream party or candidate will deliver that.
I agree with Manthorp. Because the left has failed there's no democratic path to the change we need. We have one ideology to vote for and that ideology is incapable of meaningful progress. We're not even really capable, as a society, of actual political discourse because we've all validated the same context. There *is* (aside from Corbyn who is being fucked by the neoliberals in his own party) no mainstream anti-austerity argument, no pro-Europe critique of the EU, no discussion of the wealth gap, no rational discussion of immigration, no rational discussion of security issues and surveillance and certainly no intent to do anything effectual about climate change.
I do think there's some hope in that people like Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason seem to get what's actually going on and are talking about it to anyone who will listen and movements are forming around their ideas - a good example being DiEM25, with whom I don't agree entirely but for whom I'd be *more* than happy to vote unlike any of our current parties.
Not much hope though. I think, if we don't make the planet inhospitable making it all moot and the left doesn't get its shit together and offer a workable interpretation of that alienation and disenfranchisement, we're heading for something like the 1930s again with something at least superficially like fascism on the rise and, this time, without anything like communism to stand in opposition to it.
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