Remake the World by Taylor Astra;

Author:Taylor, Astra;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2021-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

In place of the firm insistence by Gilded Age capital-P Populists and neo–Gilded Age democratic socialists that democracy should redress the market predations of industrial-age plutocrats, right-wing faux populists have abetted the continued upward consolidation of wealth and the steepening social chasms of inequality. Trump and his opportunistic immitators have focused exclusively on putative cultural affronts to the white forgotten man, who is incongruously figured as both unjustly marginalized and reassuringly universal. This debased political theology promotes the farce that “the people” is a stable entity, a pale-skinned self-evident ruling caste bound by blood, soil, Make America Great Again hats, and tiki torches. In order for them to be restored to their rightful place at the head of cultural and political life, the faithless institutions and political forces that have orchestrated their betrayal need to be cleansed—immigrants expunged and fenced out, college campuses clamped down on, patriarchs reaffirmed, and so forth. And the same logic holds for the allied reactionary movements lately seizing power in Europe. The over-the-top rhetoric of ethno-nationalist Nigel Farage reveals just how absurd such a framework is. When celebrating the outcome of the Brexit referendum, he crowed that the vote was a “victory for real people,” thereby making the 48 percent of the British electorate who cast their ballots for the UK to stay in the European Union somehow unreal.

Such pronouncements are both transparently vile and inane—and bound to sow greater disaffection among the very working-class constituencies whose material grievances they crudely distort and exploit. But they do represent another backward-tending redoubt in the longer-term battle over who counts as the people and who doesn’t—not, as some want to believe, a shocking anomaly or foreign intrusion that can be disavowed as “not who we are” (whoever that “we” may be). As we’ve seen, this tension is central to democracy itself, but it is especially central to US democracy, which was born of a constitutional compromise that counted Black human beings as fractions of a person.

Against this backdrop, we must experiment with ways of symbolizing the demos that do not mark some people as categorically “unreal” or otherwise less than others. Even more urgently, we need to marshal into the center of public life the self-representation of groups who have been erased, stereotyped, and otherwise diminished in conventional portrayals of the people. As Lawrence Goodwyn, the author of the definitive 1976 history of the American Populist movement, said about the actual legacy of Populism for would-be reformers of modern corporate capitalism, “The people need to ‘see themselves’ experimenting in democratic forms.”

The challenge, then, is how to do all of this in a way that’s not hackneyed, propagandistic, or sentimental. Contemporary advertisements pay saccharine tribute to the notion of diversity because corporations are seeking consumers, not citizens, and they’ll take anyone’s money in their quest to amass profits. How do we portray the people as a unity without papering over the shocking inequalities that define the status quo?

This question is far from an abstraction for me. I spent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.