{"id":3353,"date":"2018-09-13T17:56:25","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T15:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=3353"},"modified":"2020-03-20T02:00:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T00:00:59","slug":"our-broken-system-has-no-moderate-devotees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2018-09-13\/our-broken-system-has-no-moderate-devotees\/","title":{"rendered":"Our broken system has no ‘moderate’ devotees"},"content":{"rendered":"

Western politics is tearing itself apart, polarising into two camps \u2013 or at least, it is in the official narrative we are being fed by our corporate media. The warring camps are presented as \u201cmoderate centrists\u201d, on one side, and the \u201cextreme right\u201d, on the other. The question is framed as a choice about where one stands in relation to this fundamental political divide.<\/p>\n

But what if none of this is true? What if this isn\u2019t a feud between two opposed ideological camps but rather two differing \u2013 and irrational \u2013 reactions to the breakdown of late-stage capitalism as an economic model, a system that can no longer offer plausible solutions to the problems of our age?<\/p>\n

Neighbouring news headlines this week offered a neat illustration of the media\u2019s framing of the current situation. Representing the \u201cmoderates\u201d, German chancellor Angela Merkel made a \u201cpassionate address\u201d in which she denounced the outbreak of far-right protests in east Germany and reports of the \u201chunting down\u201d of \u201cforeigners\u201d \u2013 asylum seekers and immigrants.<\/p>\n

She observed<\/a>: \u201cThere is no excuse or explanation for rabble-rousing, in some cases the use of violence, Nazi slogans, hostility towards people who look different, to the owner of a Jewish restaurant, attacking police.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ostensibly pitted against Merkel, is Viktor Orban, Hungary\u2019s \u201cextreme right\u201d prime minister. Hungary risks being stripped of its voting rights in the European Union because of Orban\u2019s \u201crabble-rousing\u201d policies and his anti-migrant agenda.<\/p>\n

Shortly before the European parliament voted against Hungary, accusing its government of posing a \u201csystematic threat\u201d to democracy and the rule of law, Orban argued<\/a> that his country was being targeted for preferring not to be \u201ca country of migrants\u201d.<\/p>\n

He is far from an outlier. Several other EU states, from Italy to Poland, are close behind Orban in pursuing populist, anti-immigrant agendas.<\/p>\n

Family feud<\/h3>\n

But does this ideological split in Europe really reflect a divide between good and bad politics, between moderates and extremists? Are we not witnessing something else: the internal contradictions brought to the fore by a turbo-charged neoliberalism that is now so ideologically entrenched that no one dares question its suitability, let alone its morality?<\/p>\n

In truth, the row between Merkel and Orban is a family feud, between sister and brother wedded to the same self-destructive ideology but in profound disagreement about which placebo should be administered to make us feel better.<\/p>\n

What do I mean?<\/p>\n

Merkel and the mainstream neoliberal elite are committed to an ever-more deregulated world because that is imperative for a globalised economic elite searching to accrue ever more wealth and power. That elite needs open borders and a lack of significant regulation so that it can plunder unrestricted the Earth\u2019s resources \u2013 human and material \u2013 while dumping the toxic waste byproducts wherever is most profitable and convenient.<\/p>\n

In practice, that means creating maximum damage in places and against life-forms that have the least capacity to defend themselves: the poorest countries, the animal kingdom, the forests and oceans, the weather system \u2013 and, of course, against future generations that have no voice. There is a reason why the deepest seabeds are now awash with our plastic debris, poisoning and killing marine life for decades, maybe centuries, to come.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, this global elite makes a few exceptions to its policy of entirely open borders and sweeping deregulation. Through its pawns in the world’s leading capitals \u2013 the people we mistakenly think of as our political representatives \u2013 it has created small islands of opacity in which it can stash away its wealth. These \u201coffshore tax havens\u201d are highly regulated so we cannot see what goes on inside them. While the elite wants borders erased and the free movement of workers to set one against the other, the borders of these offshore “safe deposit boxes” are stringently preserved to protect the elite\u2019s wealth.<\/p>\n

International order<\/h3>\n

Meanwhile, the global elite has created international or trans-national structures and institutions precisely to remove the power of nation-states to regulate and dominate the business environment. The political class in the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Mexico or Brazil do not control the corporations. These corporations control even the biggest states. The banks are too big to fail, the arms manufacturers too committed to permanent war to rein in, the largely uniform narratives of the corporate media too powerful to dissent from.<\/p>\n

Instead, global or trans-national institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, NATO, BRICS and many others, remake our world to promote the globalised profits of the corporations.<\/p>\n

The United Nations \u2013 a rival international project \u2013 is more problematic. It was created immediately after the Second World War with the aim of imposing a law-based international order, premised on respect for human rights, to prevent future large-scale wars and genocide. In practice, however, it chiefly serves the interests of the dominant western states through their capture of the Security Council, effectively the UN\u2019s executive.<\/p>\n

A few UN institutions \u2013\u00a0those in charge of human rights and prosecuting war crimes \u2013 that have the potential to restrain the power of the global elite find themselves ever more marginalised and undermined. Both the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court have been under sustained assault<\/a> from US officials, both before and after Donald Trump became president.<\/p>\n

Towards the abyss<\/h3>\n

The internal contradictions of this globalised system \u2013 between the unfettered enrichment of the elite and the endless resource depletion of the Earth and its weakest inhabitants \u2013 are becoming ever more apparent. Historically, the toxic waste from this system was inflicted on the poorest regions first, like puddles forming in depressions in the ground during a rainstorm.<\/p>\n

As the planet has warmed, crops have failed, the poor have gone hungry, wars have broken out. All of this has been an entirely predictable outcome of the current economics of endless, carbon-based growth, coupled with resource theft. But unlike puddles, the human collateral damage of this economic system can rise up and move elsewhere. We have seen massive population displacements caused by famines and wars, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. These migrations are not about to stop. They are going to intensify as neoliberalism hurtles us towards an economic and climate abyss.<\/p>\n

The political class in the west are now experiencing profound cognitive dissonance. Merkel and the \u201cmoderates\u201d want endless growth and a world without borders that is bringing gradual ruination on their economies and their privileges. They have no answers for the \u201cextremists\u201d on the right, who acknowledge this ruination and say something needs to be done urgently about it.<\/p>\n

Orban and the far-right want to fiercely resurrect the borders that globalisation erased, to build barriers that will stop the puddles merging and inundating their higher ground. This is why the right is resurgent. They, far more than the moderates, can describe our current predicament \u2013 even if they offer solutions that are positively harmful. They want solid walls, national sovereignty, blocks on immigrants, as well as racism and violence against the \u201cforeigners\u201d already inside their borders.<\/p>\n

The system is broken<\/h3>\n

We have to stop thinking of these political debates as between the good \u201cmoderates\u201d and the nasty \u201cextreme right\u201d. This is a fundamental misconception.<\/p>\n

The deluded \u201cmoderates\u201d want to continue with a highly unsustainable form of capitalism premised on an impossible endless growth. It should be obvious that a planet with finite resources cannot sustain infinite growth, and that the toxic waste of our ever-greater consumption will poison the well on which we all depend.<\/p>\n

The west\u2019s deluded far-right, on the other hand, believe that they can stand guard and protect their small pile of privilege against the rising tide of migrants and warming oceans caused by western policies of resource theft, labour exploitation and climate destruction. The far-right’s views are no more realistic than King Canute\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Both sides are failing to grasp the central problem: that the western-imposed global economic system is broken. It is gradually being destroyed from within by its own contradictions. The \u201cmoderates\u201d are doubly blind: they refuse to acknowledge either the symptoms or the cause of the disease. The \u201cextremists\u201d are as oblivious to the causes of the illness besetting their societies as the \u201cmoderates\u201d, but they do at least recognise the symptoms as a sign of malaise, even if their solutions are entirely self-serving.<\/p>\n

Squaring the circle<\/h3>\n

This can be seen in stark fashion in the deep divide over Britain\u2019s decision to leave the European Union, so-called Brexit, which has cut across the usual left-right agendas.<\/p>\n

The Remain crowd, who want to stay in Europe, believe Britain’s future lies in upholding the failed status quo: of a turbo-charged neoliberalism, of diminishing borders and the free movement of labour, of distant, faceless technocrats making decisions in their name.<\/p>\n

Like a child pulling up the blanket to her chin in the hope it will protect her from the monsters lurking in the darkness of the bedroom, the \u201cmoderates\u201d assume European bureaucrats will protect them from economic collapse and climate breakdown. The reality, however, is that the EU is one of the trans-national institutions whose chief rationale is accelerating our rush to the abyss.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Brexit crowd think that, once out of the EU, a small island adrift in a globalised world will be able to reclaim its sovereignty and greatness. They too are going to find reality a terrifying disappointment. Alone, Britain will not be stronger. It will simply be easier prey for the US-headquartered global elite. Britain will be jumping out of the EU frying pan into the flames of the Atlanticists\u2019 stove.<\/p>\n

What is needed is not the \u201cmoderates\u201d or the \u201cextreme right\u201d, not Brexit or Remain, but an entirely new kind of politics, which is prepared to shift the paradigm.<\/p>\n

The new paradigm must accept that we live in a world that requires global solutions and regulations to prevent climate breakdown. But it must also understand that people are rightly distrustful of distant, unaccountable institutions that are easily captured by the most powerful and the most pitiless. People want to feel part of communities they know, to have a degree of control over their lives and decisions, to find common bonds and to work collaboratively from the bottom-up.<\/p>\n

The challenge ahead is to discard our current self-destructive illusions and urgently find a way to solve this conundrum \u2013 to square the circle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Western politics is tearing itself apart, polarising into two camps \u2013 or at least, it is in the official narrative we are being fed by our corporate media. The warring camps are presented as \u201cmoderate centrists\u201d, on one side, and the \u201cextreme right\u201d, on the other. The question is framed as a choice about where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,5],"class_list":{"0":"post-3353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-capitalism","8":"tag-corporations"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3353"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4193,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353\/revisions\/4193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}