Update: Events in France have proven my predictions for that country wrong, and I am frankly thrilled at this. There is also something to be said for headways in the UK: not only did Corbyn keep his seat as an independent, but a handful of left-wing independents and Greens now have seats in the Commons. How does this change the rest of what I say about Americanization? I leave it to the reader to decide.
Another update: Well damn…
1.
After fourteen years, Tory rule in the UK is gone. Good. they leave behind a destroyed country: social services gutted, wages stagnant, a National Health Service – once the pride of the British welfare state – on its knees. Not only are the Conservatives no longer in power, they were good and drubbed in the July 4th elections. Some say this is in effect the death of the Conservative Party, the oldest political party in the UK. They can’t be far off.
You’d be forgiven for missing the sighs of relief, muted as they are. This isn’t the replacement of a decrepit and inept right-wing political force by something more vibrant and principled, a party that is going to restore a future to young people and dignity to everyday life. No, the new force, the new ruler of British politics, is Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. When asked, Labour voters justified their choice at the polls not by saying they thought things would change, still less because they agreed with the party’s platform, and almost none because they believe Keir Starmer to be a principled and effective leader. The most stated reason was simply to get the Tories out.
Keir Starmer isn’t even a man, let alone a principled one. The best thing you can say about him is that he is a politician of his time: a wet, squelching sack of talking points arranged in the shape of a nice suit. And while that may make it difficult to look at him, still less to imagine him leading anything, it’s also enabled him to weather any challenge to the course of the Labour Party relatively unscathed.
Time after time, in public appearances on TV and radio, angry voters have savaged his indefensible policies. How do you, a human rights lawyer, defend the deliberate starvation of Gazans? How can you shrug at news of drowning refugees? How is it that you can call Labour a party of working people then scrap any policy that might make their lives easier? Starmer’s reaction is the same every time. His eyes widen (but only a little bit) he lets a jumble of words ooze out of his gob that seems to mold and dissolve what people say without ever substantially refuting anything. It’s smarmy and untrustworthy, but remarkably effective.
Even when he’s bullying the embattled left wing of his own party, you can’t find anything of substance. It’s not just that there’s no truth to what he’s saying. There’s nothing of anything. No viciousness. No vitriol. And certainly no principle. Yes, he’s managed to completely kneecap the left of the Labour Party, but it’s been entirely through bureaucratic machination. What he says or does to justify those maneuvers is ultimately irrelevant. It happened. You have no say. Get used to it. With a massive majority in the Commons, Starmer’s Labour will bring this style to bear, but, oddly enough, it will always be directed against the very people he vowed to help.
This, of course, won’t hold. Even the humblest expectations can go in dangerous directions when they are deflected, and there are now far worse parties than the Tories wait in the wings. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party won thirteen seats. Farage no doubt clapped like a manic seal as Le Pen stormed the French elections, and his party’s showing is likely going to make him more emboldened and, frankly, more insufferable. He isn’t exactly the best political operator out there, but under these circumstances he doesn’t have to be. All he and the rest of the Reform MPs will have to do is wade through the ankle-high goo that drips from Starmer’s mouth in public appearances.
And to think: we could have had Jeremy Corbyn instead. At least he got to keep his seat. Good.
2.
Shift the focus to France. There was a common graffito on the walls of Paris during the 2017 elections: “Macron 2017 = Le Pen 2022.” It may have been off by a couple years, but, well, we got there. The horse-trading between the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire and Macron’s centrist Ensemble bloc may deny Le Pen’s Rassemblement National an outright majority in the French parliament, but the margin will be slim. Meaning that the RN will still have room to pull the more conservative and/or opportunist among the center into its orbit. Fun fucking times.
It’s not an entirely dismal picture. The NFP was brought together on short notice, and it ran on a (mostly) principled program of opposing austerity and racism and withdrawing French support for the war on Gaza. That this program came in second reflects appetite for a different order.
Whether this can translate to a meaningful opposition is something else entirely. The NFP’s right wing – led by the Parti Socialiste – has operated like most social democratic parties under neoliberalism. Meaning they have spent more time administering austerity and defending racism than they have opposing it for the past three decades. The best thing that can be said for the PS is that it hasn’t managed to win more than a handful of seats in the past several years.
Still, the NFP knew it needed the PS, and vice versa. Pity the PS haven’t been acting like it. Memories of successfully ratfucking the NFP’s predecessor NUPES must have been dancing in their heads this whole time, because they’ve spent a good chunk of this campaign talking about how they refuse to let anyone to their left lead them in parliament. That La France Insoumise have shamefully accommodated these maneuvers only means they will be in a further compromised position to put up a fight to the RN’s agenda.
If the center-left is unafraid of courting the void like this, then we shouldn’t lose focus of whose fault all of this really is: Emmanuel shitting Macron. This is a man who, after the RN dominated the European elections, decided to call elections at home. It was a decision that just about everyone saw for what it was: suicide, and not just for him and his party. The RN, with its undiluted scapegoating of Muslims and immigrants and queers, its hostility to anything smacking of workers’ self-determination, was scratching at Macron’s front door. Rather than fortify the barricades, he swung it wide open and let them vomit out his window onto the folks below.
True to form, Macron spent as much time in previous weeks targeting the left as he did the far-right. This election was about defeating “competing extremes” he said. Now that Ensemble has been kicked down into third place — a full seven points behind the NFP — he is equivocating and hedging bets. The NFP had always said that it would order its third-place and below candidates to step down in the second round of the elections and urge its voters to support the center in order to stop the far-right. They’ve now done so. And while several Ensemble candidates have done the same, many other third-place Ensemble candidates have so far refused to issue such a clear order. Why be principled when being blind to history is so much easier?
3.
Remember last week when everyone was wondering who was going to replace Joe Biden? Primarily, it was a moment of severe uncertainty and frustration, but folded in there was that little spark of hope, that maybe the 2024 American elections wouldn’t be quite the dismal plod into the cesspool we thought it would be.
That spark is gone. Biden is sticking around, debate-time sundowning be damned. Whether he truly believes he can beat Donald Trump is irrelevant. Not just because his metric for such things is utterly and hopelessly broken, but because there is no real mechanism to get him to bow out. For the past several months, Democrats have shrieked in the ears of the left, youth, people of color, and just about anyone who shared the slightest shred of doubt: all that was needed to defeat Trump’s blustering lies and disregard for democracy was for Biden to stand next to him and show the world how upright and morally righteous he was. Hard to do that when you can’t put together a sentence.
Biden’s incoherence isn’t simply a matter of age. Yes, he’s 81 years old, but he’s been a mean old man for at least forty of those. He has spent most of his political life as a spiteful, prevaricating emissary of some of the worst people produced by American capitalism. With all the moral and intellectual contradiction he’s had to navigate, all the cruel and nonsensical justifications he’s had to trot out over the years, it’s no wonder that his brains are scrambled eggs.
A hack writer would say that Biden’s advanced state of decay is a stand-in for American democracy. It’s true but unoriginal. It also doesn’t fully capture the stakes. Not so long ago, pundits in Europe, Latin America, Canada, the UK, and beyond spoke nebulously but ominously about the “Americanization” of their own political process. This was roughly around the same time as Tariq Ali and others on the left started describing what they called “the extreme center,” and the two concepts overlap enough for them to be usefully compared. In some ways, you might call “Americanization” the cultural imperialist logic of the radical center.
The basics go like this. The financial crisis of 2008 burst the bubble of neoliberalism. Rather than prompting a genuine reassessment of the choices that brought the global economy to its knees – privatization, deregulation, shredding the social safety net, and anything else that might have made ordinary people’s lives more stable and safe – the response was to simply entrench them. All the structures and institutions that had progressively removed economic decision-making from any kind of democratic say dug their heels in and kept doing what they had always done. Those structures and political formations that had always presented themselves as pragmatic and realistic had to finally reveal themselves as ruthless and venal.
The results were disastrous of course. But for it to work, for the marketization of anything and everything to be taken as a natural given, then official politics had to accelerate in the direction we had already seen it drift. Weaponized identities and endless culture wars had to take the place of actual policy discussions. Vision for the future was a frivolous indulgence next to protecting your own. Alternative voices weren’t to be opposed on anything like a reasonable basis, but painted as dangerous outsiders looking to dissolve the fabric of everything you hold dear. Up is down. Black is white. Nothing means anything. And at the center of it, the same machinations of domination and exploitation just keep chugging along.
Many Americans will read this and scratch their heads. For many of us, this is how American politics has always operated. Which is why these nattering heads abroad were framing it as Americanization in the first place. The reason we hear less of it today is that, to a great degree, the process of Americanization has been completed. Of course Starmer will work with Trump if he’s elected. Trump is impossible without people like him, and now the reverse is true. It’s not difficult to imagine Starmer, with his gooey bile spilling from his mouth, coming fully apart next to a smirking, lie-spewing Farage. That Macron has been spared this fate may simply wind up one of history’s cruel mercies.
4.
It was always going to end this way. Americans love to think of democracy as something uniquely theirs. Frankly, the only thing American about American democracy is how brittle it is, how vulnerable its vanity and self-regard renders it. Like all entities with such an aggressive ego, it is eggshell fragile.
This is a model of government that has never actually believed its own promises. But somewhere down the line enough people started to believe in it that it became too late to stop the charade.
Read this…
Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either… Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history.
That quote comes from John Adams. Yes, that John Adams. A prime architect of American democracy who saw the practice as essentially another form of mob rule, a sure path to bring down any society from the inside out. No wonder its standards and practices are so weak. There have been very few attempts to overhaul and revamp it. The last major one was Reconstruction, and it had to be dismantled by the Klan.
This, in other words, is the model that we exported to the rest of the world. That it has been some time since any significant section of the globe actually thought of America as any kind of beacon is beside the point. Particularly since there hasn’t been any other model on offer. Sure, most people abroad who still defend America’s most American characteristics tend to be the most obnoxious, braying, inhumane ogres you can imagine. But, much as we may hate to admit it, they are the ones with the wind of events at their backs.
Here’s the part in most articles like this where we talk about the need to resist. But resist how? It’s one of the problems and challenges inherent in this moment, when anything earnest, anything that tries to cobble together a vision for a future worth living, smacks of lame centrist pabulum, kente cloths worn by congresspeople taking a knee in the US Capitol right before the vote to increase police budgets. These are the people who have affixed a hashtag to resistance and rendered it meaningless. They are the flotsam of Adams’ letter. They are also being exported.
The chances of reinjecting some actual meaning into the concept of resistance are by no means high. It will take a lot of experimenting, trial and error. The increasingly likely scenario, though, is that all of us are just waiting for our own Biden moment: staring into the camera, shocked that we still exist, waiting for the coming implosion.
Header photo is from Ravenous (1999).