3 votes

American unreality - In breaking the link between politics and objective truth, the United States seeks to fashion a new world – but it is one built on shifting sands

8 comments

  1. [7]
    mtset
    Link
    Excuse me, but what the fuck is this author smoking? Who's out here saying the Uighurs' persecution isn't important, other than, like, neo-Stalinists?

    the woke movement believes “whiteness” accounts for all the evils of modern societies. America’s record of slavery and racism is all too real. Even so, passing over in silence the repression and enslavement of peoples outside the West – Tibetans, Uighurs and now Mongols in China, for example – because they cannot be condemned as crimes of white supremacy reveals a wilfully parochial and self-absorbed outlook.

    Excuse me, but what the fuck is this author smoking? Who's out here saying the Uighurs' persecution isn't important, other than, like, neo-Stalinists?

    14 votes
    1. [6]
      NaraVara
      Link Parent
      Even so it mostly gets talked about and characterized as an extension of American political dynamics. They're analogized to how America has treated its indigenous population. The focus is,...

      Even so it mostly gets talked about and characterized as an extension of American political dynamics. They're analogized to how America has treated its indigenous population. The focus is, basically, that the American experience tells us everything we need to know about the situation, and all other countries are just running off our template rather than using these as multiple data points to do comparative analysis.

      You see the same dynamic when going over issues in Burma, the caste system or religious tensions in India, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, etc. It might change around who the "White people" and who the "minorities" are in each story, but it's like a Mad Libs thing where template is always our idea of the American one and then we swap out how we fill in the blanks.

      The same dynamic happened during the peak time-period of Western Colonialism. The British had a fixed society of how societies were ordered based on Eurocentric history and not very well developed theories of anthropology. They then built administrative states everywhere with these assumptions in mind. Almost none of them were very well suited to the cultures they were meant to govern and the countries affected continue dealing with the fallout of the ethnic and religious (and intra-ethnic and intra-religious) enmities cemented during that period to this day.

      6 votes
      1. [5]
        mtset
        Link Parent
        This is a really interesting statement, because it's not something I've seen in either the ultra-"woke" small liberal arts college I went to, where I studied religious studies and critical...

        The focus is, basically, that the American experience tells us everything we need to know about the situation, and all other countries are just running off our template rather than using these as multiple data points to do comparative analysis.

        This is a really interesting statement, because it's not something I've seen in either the ultra-"woke" small liberal arts college I went to, where I studied religious studies and critical identity studies among other things, nor in the ultra-Left online communities I'm part of. Indeed, it's a widely criticized component of liberal ideology - the kind of imperialism of ideals that allowed American Democrats to justify the war in Afghanistan as "liberation".

        You see the same dynamic when going over issues in Burma, the caste system or religious tensions in India, South Africa, Israel-Palestine, etc.

        I really don't. Israel-Palestine is a great example, actually - very few Leftists I know are really interested in analogizing IP to the US slavery issue or the US indigenous genocides, because that doesn't acknowledge the material realities of the people involved. Material conditions are the core of Leftist analysis, so this kind of lazy thought pattern is hard to square with most Left theory.

        I'm sure there are people who do all of these things, but by defining "wokeism" by these criteria you squeeze it into being such a specific term, discussing such a tiny group of people, that's it's essentially useless to compare it to the highly popular far-right ideologies it's being compared to here. Better by far to engage with either the centrist liberalism of the Democratic party in America, which is subject to a lot of these issues, or with particular Leftist ideologies. There are real discussions to be had about the ways in which American state communist ideology fails to grapple with the historical legacy of authoritariansim, and about how American Left-anarchism fails to sufficiently anticipate the challenges of stateless society-building, but none of those are presented here; indeed, I doubt the author has any real idea of the differences of those ideologies in the first place.

        10 votes
        1. [3]
          NaraVara
          Link Parent
          Anything happening in a college or 'ultra-Left online communities' is basically going to be an extremely niche subset of perspectives that is years out from percolating into mainstream discourse,...

          because it's not something I've seen in either the ultra-"woke" small liberal arts college I went to, where I studied religious studies and critical identity studies among other things, nor in the ultra-Left online communities I'm part of.

          Anything happening in a college or 'ultra-Left online communities' is basically going to be an extremely niche subset of perspectives that is years out from percolating into mainstream discourse, if it ever does. More avant-garde theories that we were discussing when I was in college, in the mid-2000s, has only now started to get real attention in mainstream publications like The Economist or NY Times.

          I think the central issue might just be that you and the author aren't using "woke" the same way. I usually see it referring to radical liberals and progressives more than I see it applied to the hard left, who usually dismiss them as being obsessed with semiotics to the exclusion of everything else or, more cynically, being led by the nose by capital to direct their efforts towards things that don't structurally threaten it. So he's not squeezing it into a really specific or tiny group of people, it's actually quite a wide net. You said yourself it's emblematic of "the centrist liberalism of the Democratic party." If anything that's the mainstream and the groups you're talking about are the niches. I definitely see plenty of Leftists, and not just radical liberal Democrats, talk about Palestine as a very flat, White vs. not-White dichotomy. It gets even worse when dealing with the extremely plural societies in Asia and Africa where cultural divisions cleave along a whole panoply of different, overlapping identities.

          4 votes
          1. [2]
            mtset
            Link Parent
            The rest of what you say I'm basically on board with (or don't think we'll get anywhere arguing about) - but what does "radical liberal" mean? That strikes me as a contradiction in terms.

            radical liberals and progressives

            The rest of what you say I'm basically on board with (or don't think we'll get anywhere arguing about) - but what does "radical liberal" mean? That strikes me as a contradiction in terms.

            2 votes
            1. NaraVara
              Link Parent
              Traditionally it refers to, like Market Socialists and Georgists. But nowadays I usually hear it used to refer to an extreme identity politics orientation or 'girl boss feminism.' But I was using...

              Traditionally it refers to, like Market Socialists and Georgists. But nowadays I usually hear it used to refer to an extreme identity politics orientation or 'girl boss feminism.' But I was using it more as a statement of partisanship or militancy rather than any specific ideological orientation. Liberals can be quite radical, just ask Robespierre.

              1 vote
        2. meff
          Link Parent
          As someone from the South Asian diaspora, you can see it even here when we cover international current events. The commentary here during the American Afghan exit was a good example. Most of the...

          As someone from the South Asian diaspora, you can see it even here when we cover international current events. The commentary here during the American Afghan exit was a good example. Most of the consternation in those threads was around how the departure of the American government would be a blow to Leftism in Afghanistan against people who felt that America and other Western nations spent too much money in Afghanistan. These are both perspectives deeply rooted in Western outlook and values. Very, very few perspectives even brought up Afghan history, Afghan cultural values, or the Islamic values that the actual people in the country hold.

          3 votes
  2. NaraVara
    Link
    Interesting breakdown of shifts in American culture and American self-perception. One interesting point is the tendency he points out among the left and right to apply American socio-political...

    Interesting breakdown of shifts in American culture and American self-perception. One interesting point is the tendency he points out among the left and right to apply American socio-political dynamics (centrality of White supremacy on the left, centrality of capitalism on the right) and global universals.

    For the Portuguese former diplomat Bruno Maçães, however, the decoupling of American culture from the objective world is a portent of great things to come. Finally shedding its European inheritance, America is creating a truly new world, “a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilisation, rooted in new feelings and thoughts”. The result, Maçães suggests, is that American politics has become a reality show. The country of Roosevelt and Eisenhower was one in which, however lofty the aspiration, there was always a sense that reality could prove refractory. The new America is built on the premise that the world can be transformed by reimagining it. Liberals and wokeists, conservatives and Trumpists are at one in treating media confabulations as more real than any facts that may lie beyond them.