The Summer Liberalism Ate Itself

Western liberalism is devouring itself in a frenzy of arrogance, self-righteousness and terrible choices.

A devouring that emerges from liberalism’s inherent contradictions.

The outcome will be nouveau fascism. (This term will almost certainly not catch on but I like it).

Forget brat summer. This is fash summer. Ok it’s brat/fash summer. (Don’t groan or groan, whatever, but I like this one too).

Events across the west have become too hard to ignore.

Let’s go through them.

Firstly and most obviously, liberal centrist political parties in power across the west, from the US, to Germany to the UK to France to Australia, are supporting the Gaza genocide.

It’s a genocide. An army invaded a territory that can’t defend itself, destroyed all the infrastructure, all the universities, all the schools, all the markets, all the bakeries, all the cultural sites, stopped all the aid, trapped the people inside and randomly murders them from the sky and from the ground in massacres day after day. I’ve seen beheaded babies, toddlers, women, children and men. Just some of the most violent deaths that can befall a person being documented day after day. And proudly filmed by the perpetrators who also rape prisoners of war in camps. The other day Israel started shelling tents set up on the beach from warships in the Med. The world’s leading medical journal The Lancet has estimated 186,000 civilian deaths.

Even Israeli scholars hesitant at first to use the label are like yeah, uhhhhh, I guess this is genocide.

But Hamas! But October 7th! After trying to deny Israel was doing mass civilian killing, this is all the defenders of genocide have got now. I mean, let’s indulge these people and pretend history began on October 7th, what’s the argument here? That you were provoked into a genocide?

That’s not an argument. That’s an admission.

Aaaaannnnyway, the point is that genocide, the deepest of human-made horrors, the final stage of unrecoverable degeneracy within a society, is being supported politically and militarily by the liberal good guys. The rainbow flag guys and gals we’ve been told we must elect to stop the bad guys, who apparently would do worse things. But what’s worse than genocide?

But they’ll take away your right to vote for a genocide!

Cool argument friend.

Biden-Harris have sent a plane load of weapons to Israel to commit genocide on average once every sixteen hours. The UK has sent more than 60 plane loads of weapons to Gaza. A British diplomat recently resigned in protest. After the US, Germany is Israel’s biggest weapons supplier.

Right-wing governments have done the same, like Italy (Israel’s third biggest arms dealer) and Hungary. Trump would do the same on Israel/Palestine. But there’s no point in focusing on them because they’re doing/will do what we’re told bad guys do. The more instructive analysis is to look at what the good guys are doing under the banner of progressive politics. Because from here we can more easily work out a direction of travel for ourselves. From here we can see what people can be convinced to vote for in the name of competence, kindness and empathy.

Last week I wrote about the DNC and what it told us about empty liberal politics in America. A DNC of vibes that endorsed genocide, the death penalty and lethal violence.

But what else and who else we got this brat/fash summer?

We got Kier Starmer, Britain’s new leader.

A man with a political vision as narrow as his vocal cords.

A grasping, inflated opportunist who’s first six weeks of power have seen him pander to Nazis and double down on the Ayn Randian economics that have swallowed and hollowed Britain for the last decade.

An economics that any reasonable person would conclude the Tories had been roundly rejected because of.

But this is not the conclusion Labour have come to. Oh no. They’ve decided people just wanted a change of colour, not a change of policy. So Starmer has warmed up the language of ‘difficult choices’ to soften Brits up for more public sector cuts with a side dish of ‘tough on benefits.’

They’ve done this because it’s what a liberal centrist political framework that has no critique of capitalism demands, and what liberal centrist mega donor capitalists demand.

It won’t work. Things won’t get worse before they get better. They’ll just get worse.

All this comes two weeks after fascists roamed the streets of England hunting down asylum seekers and beating up brown people. At the height of the terror, hospital wings staffed mainly by non-Brits were closing early so people could get home and avoid the roving gangs of fascists.

Centrists pretended to be shocked at this outbreak of fascist violence while fully ignoring that just weeks before the election Starmer had said things like ‘Immigration is out of control. I’ll have the planes ready on the first day to send them back to their countries.”

And Starmer’s response to all the racism and fash violence? Hire an extra 100 intelligence officers for immigration enforcement and promise to ‘surge’ deportations of asylum seekers.

Because sometimes Nazis have Legitimate Concerns.

Starmer also rejected out of hand an offer by the EU to allow young people freedom of movement on the continent again.

They like their prison island thank you very much. Brits are now some of the most geographically constrained people in the west. They can’t cross borders like other Europeans and they don’t have the variety of a United States. A grey, dreary, little prison island, a shit Australia. (If you’re rich you can buy your way out, of course. A visa for EU residency starts at around $40k).

Starmer’s approval rating is already tanking as people sit back and wonder who and what it is they actually elected in the passionate throes of Tory rejectionism.

Another spin on the liberal wheel of misfortune brings us to Emmanuel Macron, the vertically challenged ego of France.

Now this is a good one.

In a preening hissy fit after his centrist party lost in the European elections, he called a national election, expecting to once again blackmail France into voting for him to stop the far-right. Instead they voted for the left.

Emmanuel was not happy at such a show of defiance. So for a while he just pretended the election never happened. Then when it was pointed out that an election had in fact happened, he said it was pointless to hand over power because the left couldn’t cobble together a government so it was better for everyone that his electoral bloc (which came third) just hung around in power.

The left have been protesting that this isn’t really how democracy should work, and that even if they can’t get a government together they should be given the chance to try. Because, you know, they won an election. Emmanuel says no. Too dangerous. So brat!

And that’s where France is I write this.

All these events are proving the prophecy of liberalism as a contradiction machine that, finally, comes to the point where it is unable to resolve these contradictions.

The primary contradiction being, essentially, how to make corporate capitalism and democracy work together. On the one hand rich people can buy unlimited access, influence, and change the laws they want to change, but on the other here’s a vote normal person and honestly that decides everything, that vote. You’ve just got to vote for change! And if you do, well, we’ll decide on the ifs and the whethers of change.

Contradictions that flow further from this include how to have militarism as a core national strategy, how to give trillions to weapons manufacturers, how to make them the richest corporations on Earth and not eventually watch yourself arm a genocide.

Further down the flow chart we have how to talk about nations and borders and worthy/unworthy/legal/illegal immigrants and how to say things like ‘British jobs for British people’ without eventually creating fascist street gangs.

Others include telling people you’re going to be the party of public health and then throttling public health in service to billionaires and capitalism.

Liberalism is eating itself alive and its contradictions are dribbling out of its arse.

So what will happen now?

Different countries are on different trajectories, but the consequence will be a blossoming of nouveau fascism which I see being crystalized first in the UK where the politics, the economics and the social pressures are lining up perfectly.

The politics is sad centrist liberalism expressed by people who offer only platitudes and minor aesthetic differences to right-wingers, while aping their anti-immigration rhetoric. The economics is a country broken by a Brexit which triggered a push for Singaporean tax structures and free trade zones which only further enriched the rich and impoverished the mass of people. The social pressures will be generated by the further crumbling of the NHS and welfare state, which will combine with racist and xenophobic sentiment to shake a bottle fizzing with anger.

Six weeks ago the far-right Reform party, only two years old, came second in 98 seats in Britain’s 650 seat parliament. I expect that by the next election, with all of these trends having shaken that bottle to bursting, Reform will win these seats and more, and will do a power sharing deal with an anti-immigration Tory party under a new leader they are currently electing. Labour themselves will probably be the ones wiped out this time, their sad centrism offering no real meat to anyone.

In England, nouveau fascism will be at its heart a form of white, world war two mythology nationalism, with room for other colours if you pledge allegiance to the nation. It’s fury and anger will be directed first and foremost at Muslims, and secondly at foreigners in general, especially brown ones.

Nouveau fascism will be defined by a new class of capitalist, grifting on government cronyism, a cronyism directed by nouveau fascist politicians such as the Reform party leader Nigel Farage. Nouveau fascist capitalists will run BRITISH-OWNED businesses and prioritize BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH PEOPLE, like the liberals themselves have been promising for years. These fascists though will finally get it done. People will vote for the real thing.

Nouveau fascist politicians will be, as their name suggests, new to parliament, little Englanders bubbling with rage at the woke, the WEF, vaccines, the climate hoax etc. I expect a good proportion of Britain’s next intake of politicians to draw most of their politics from YouTube and TikTok conspiracy videos.

Nouveau fascism will do mass deportations of both illegal and legal migrants, prioritizing Muslims and working their way down from there. Further anti-Muslim pogroms will be encouraged and policed with a light-touch.

Culturally Britain is already ripe for this, its media landscape a megaphone of right wing word salad sentiment, and its judiciary already captured by the right. The Tory government did away with some forms of trial by jury, a policy Labour are not going to reverse, and as a result environmental protestors are being given longer prison sentences than violent fascists. Nouveau fascists will take full advantage of a compliant media and justice system.

Is there an alternative? Yes, as always there is. But it’s a long shot with everything stacked against it. The only alternative is a left movement that builds on the ashes of Corbynism and results in the creation of a new political party that can take on both Reform and Labour.

There is some potential to bring in working class voters, but the liberal middle class are the key to how this is all going to go down. Key to whether a left movement can win. Because they will have a choice: to be radicalized or not.

The liberal middle class, obsessed by postcodes and school catchments, won’t particularly want nouveau fascists in charge, but their economic and social position will not be threatened if they are. So they’ll be torn between taking action on behalf of other people, or not. Torn between using their time and money to help build a popular left movement or re-mortgaging their home to free up capital to buy a new investment property.

I’m not confident they’ll choose the former.

After the Kamala hype has faded, leftists in the US, for any hope of a decent future, will need to initiate a similar process, resurrect the promise of Bernie and force the same dilemma on the liberal middle class.

So this is the state of play in summer 2024 as I see it.

A liberal political class increasingly unable to resolve the contradictions they have brought to the boil, but also a class that refuses to recognize their role in bringing everything to the boil. A political class that in trying to thread the needle on so many issues, misses a target voting demographic every single time.

Examples:

“climate change is a disaster but we must continue to drill for oil.”

“immigration is the foundation of our nation but stay away we’re building the wall.”

“the rule of international law is paramount and never again but we’re arming a genocide.”

The audience for these messages is shrinking away.

In the UK, Starmer breathed a final lungful of air into centrism.

Harris is likely to be America’s last centrist gasp.

Neither of them can hide our glide path to nouveau fascism.