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Privileged people calling less privileged people "stupid" doesn't seem to be working...

It's not leave/remain that I'm pissed off about, I've had loads of friendly debates in the boozer etc. with remain voters, leave ones and non-voters. It's the sneering undercurrent of a lot of folk who are labelling the working class thick and not worthy of making decisions that affect our lives. We need to be lead according to them because we're incapable of deciding what's good for us. That's what I find disturbing.

I can agree to a point, however, it's the inability to accept some of the causes of their concerns that led people to vote leave, was just not Europe alone and voting to leave the Union will not stop those concerns becoming reality. This stubborness not look at other causes really is exasperating and I can rather see how the lofty high handedness of remainers, holds its nose to those who voted leave, because leave simply does not want to engage.

I myself have always been strongly against free movement of labour, voted UKIP when residing in Runnymede etc.. However, in the last weeks saw a very real effort by 'vote leave' cavorting and mobilising people who hold rascits views, bottom of the barrel politics, views like this should be left under stones and should not be engaged. So I voted remain, after my entire adult life wanting to leave.
 
Many of you have probably seen this: another excellent piece by Kenan Malik. Same themes as usual, and many points already covered here and other threads. But worth reading for the way he structures the argument; an eloquent piece:

FROM THE END OF HISTORY TO 2016

"In the quarter of a century since Fukuyama wrote his essay, politics, particularly in the West, has indeed shifted away from ‘ideological struggle’ towards ‘the endless solving of technical problems’. [...] Politics has become less about competing visions of the kinds of society people want than a debate about how best to manage the existing political system, a question more of technocratic management rather than of social transformation."

[...]

"As a result of these changes there has opened up a new political faultline; not, as in the past, between left and right, but one between those who are at home in, or at least willing to accommodate to, this globalized post-ideological, world, and those who feel left out, dispossessed and voiceless."
"The left, no longer rooted in old-style class politics, responded to the new political terrain in one of two ways. The first was to look to bureaucratic or managerial means of creating a more progressive society, in a sense to grasp the Fukuyama argument that ideological struggle and idealism would have to ‘replaced by economic calculation [and] the endless solving of technical problems’."

[...]

"The second response to the challenge posed by the demise of class politics was to embrace ‘identity politics’. The roots of identity politics are long and reactionary".

[...]

"As the left has transformed itself through mangerialism and the politics of identity, many sections of the working class have found themselves politically voiceless at the very time their lives had become more precarious, as jobs have declined, public services been savaged, austerity imposed, and inequality on the rise. Far from helping create new mechanisms through which the working class could challenge economic marginalization and political voicelessness, many liberals, and many on the left, have come to see the working class as part of the problem."

[...]

"Having lost their traditional means through which to vent disaffection, and finding themselves despised by liberals and the left, many working class voters have themselves turned to the language of identity politics. The causes of the marginalization of working class communities are largely economic and political. But many have come to see that marginalization primarily as a cultural loss. The very decline of the economic and political power of the working class and the weakening of labour organizations and social democratic parties, have helped obscure the economic and political roots of social problems. And as culture has become the medium through which social issues are refracted, so they, too, have turned to the language of identity to express their discontent".

[...]

"What we are witnessing globally is a crisis both of the political class and of progressive opposition to it. It is this dual crisis that is unstitching politics. To return to Francis Fukuyama’s vision, the current tumult is the result of struggles for recognition that remain unshaped by progressive movements, of ideological struggles in a post-ideological world."

[...]

"What we need is to re-establish a politics of solidarity not rooted in the politics of identity, whether of the right or the left, to establish new social mechanisms through which to link liberal ideas about individual rights and freedom, including freedom of movement, with progressive economic arguments and a belief in the community and the collective".
 
Much to like in the piece as ever, but whilst I personally like the conclusion I don't see the means to persuade those who have drifted away. I think those currently inclined to the right already feel pretty solid together and arguments about rights like freedom of movement will just be received as a 'you're wrong' sort of hectoring. Ensure housing rights for citizens and then free movement wouldn't be such an issue - an idea to let all others spring from.
 
Yeah democracy seemed like such a good idea st first. But then I found out you had to include poor people!

There are loads of poor people that don't feel the need to turn towards racism. So anyone that voted UKIP or for Trump is surely either racist or thick.
 
New yorker
I literally just finished reading another piece from there that used trump as a jump off point. It's smug/patronising in a different way - or at least a more formally sophisticated way - but does at least manage to get in this great Adorno quote:

Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.
 
I literally just finished reading another piece from there that used trump as a jump off point. It's smug/patronising in a different way - or at least a more formally sophisticated way - but does at least manage to get in this great Adorno quote:
Christ that is terrible. Those proles with their pop-cultural frivolity!

EDIT: And causing damage to the the idea of intellectual property, :eek:
 
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I saw that yesterday. Mental.

Well received by many, well not many, but a very vocal and confident minority



I think that this stuff is going to be the sort of thing that characterises the 'resistance' to right-wing populism.
 
So people who vote the wrong way should no longer be allowes to vote?

They can vote. Everyone should be able to vote and should exercise that right. It doesn't mean that if there are a majority of idiots that others shouldn't call them up on it.

We have a Tory government because the majority of people in this country are idiotic. Also displayed by the vote on leaving Europe.
 
They can vote. Everyone should be able to vote and should exercise that right. It doesn't mean that if there are a majority of idiots that others shouldn't call them up on it.

We have a Tory government because the majority of people in this country are idiotic. Also displayed by the vote on leaving Europe.

What we need is a smart politics of rationality!
 
Christ that is terrible. Those proles with the pop-cultural frivolity!

EDIT: And causing damage to the the idea of intellectual property, :eek:
Is it just me. Or does this article while decrying pop culture and the election of Trump as some form of fascism, set of on a path which if taken to its conclusion would most certainly be rather fascist.


Oh and 'the local hirelings of logic' :D
I wonder if they are related to the souless minions of orthodoxy?
 
Is it just me. Or does this article while decrying pop culture and the election of Trump as some form of fascism, set of on a path which if taken to its conclusion would most certainly be rather fascist.


Oh and 'the local hirelings of logic' :D
I wonder if they are related to the souless minions of orthodoxy?

If given the chance at a Pinochet that would enforce favoured social mores, put the right people in their place etc I think a lot of liberals would jump at it.
 
They can vote. Everyone should be able to vote and should exercise that right. It doesn't mean that if there are a majority of idiots that others shouldn't call them up on it.

We have a Tory government because the majority of people in this country are idiotic. Also displayed by the vote on leaving Europe.
Is this some sort of meta-joke about the thread title?
 
If given the chance at a Pinochet that would enforce favoured social mores, put the right people in their place etc I think a lot of liberals would jump at it.

The concept of the "liberal" seems to exist in far less numbers than people on here seem to think.
 
Or people could have less racist feelings.
Let's just go with your belief that the majority of people in the UK are idiots* and > 15% of them are racists, how do you intend to produce these "less racist feelings"? Cos call be crazy but I don't think shouting "racist idiot" at them is really going to work.

*of course nothing like the majority of people in the UK voted Conservative, so who are you actually calling idiots here? Non-voters? Anybody who didn't vote Labour?
 
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There was the question of what the "Left" should be doing, leaving aside for the minute that my thoughts on the left are similar to seventh bullets, one thing that people on the left might want to do is get back in touch with a little humanism.
 
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