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Where should socialists put their energy in 2023? This is a question facing many on the left.

There are some obvious answers. The wave of industrial militancy that has swept across the country has necessitated a solidarity movement alongside it. Campaign groups like Enough is Enough have provided a space for people to begin organising for the economic transformations the country needs. With the climate crisis getting ever more urgent and a socialist solution to it ever more necessary leftists have an important role to play within the climate movement.

These are all vital movements for the left to be organising within. But most socialists accept that while the collective struggle of social movements and of organised labour are crucial to building a new society, these movements also need a political expression. They need a political organisation able to fight elections, assume political office and ultimately wield state power. Since Keir Starmers ascension to the top of his party, it is abundantly clear that political expression will not and cannot come from Labour.

Instead, it must come from elsewhere. For a growing number of people including more than a dozen left wing ex-Labour Councillors, Jeremy Corbyns former spokesperson, and outriders and influencers of the Corbyn era that political expression of the tsunami of rebellion sweeping across the country, the political expression of socialism, will come through the Green Party.

In light of that, our editor Chris Jarvis is writing a weekly column setting out why disaffected socialists should join the Green Party.

In a previous article in this series, we looked at the Green Partys internal democracy and how that compares with Labours. That article focused on the ability for members to shape the partys policy platform. Equally important is the process for selecting candidates for elections.

The Labour Partys selection processes have reached new levels of notoriety in recent months. Left wing candidates across the country are being blocked from standing for parliamentary seats for the most spurious of reasons. Often, the alleged infractions from the would-be MPs include having liked innocuous Tweets from figures from other political parties. In one instance, the well respected Lauren Townsend was told she wouldnt be able to stand because among other reasons she had liked a tweet from Nicola Sturgeon in which she had announced she had tested negative for Covid-19. As Momentums head of communications Angus Satow has highlighted, the same standards are very clearly not being applied to candidates on the centre or right of the party.

Labours bureaucracy blocking candidates from the left from standing for selection isnt confined to Westminster seats. Its also filtering down to selections for Council candidates too. Examples such as Cal Corkery previously the leader of the Labour Group on Portsmouth City Council illustrate the point well. He was deselected mere months before the local elections. His crimes? Liking a Facebook page and sharing a post on Facebook which celebrated increasing Labour membership.

Thats just the tip of the iceberg. In Leicester, 40% of sitting Labour Councillors were told last week that they wouldnt be able to stand in the upcoming elections.

As has been argued by others at great length, all of this is part of an attempt to centralise selections within the Labour Party, reduce the influence members have over their own party and to marginalise the left. The intention is in the short term to prevent left wing candidates from getting selected and taking office, and in the long term to extinguish the left from any positions of significance within Labour.

Many will recognise this in the approach Keir Starmer has taken to his predecessor as Labour leader. This article is being published on the eve of the National Executive Committee meeting which will likely see Jeremy Corbyn blocked from standing as a Labour candidate at the next election. The motion which Starmer has proposed would see the man he once described as a colleague and a friend prevented from standing as a parliamentary candidate appears to cite only one reason for taking this step that he failed to win a general election. This despite fellow election losing former Labour leader Ed Miliband sitting in Starmers shadow cabinet.

It all stinks of a stitch-up of a leader seeking to drag the party to the right, to purge the left and to obtain power at any cost. Unscrupulous and Machiavellian in the extreme. This hostile attitude to internal democracy combined with an aggressive anti-left agenda is creating a well-documented toxic environment for the socialists who have remained within the Labour Party.

By contrast, the experience of leftists within the Green Party is largely positive, as ex-Labour Councillors who have defected to the Greens have found. The democratic culture in the party is far better than that within Labour.

When it comes to candidate selections, that democratic culture means that local parties and their members autonomy are respected. There are no centrally approved longlists or shortlists. There is no political interference preventing candidates from making it onto the ballot paper. Socialists arent blocked from standing for the Greens theyre standing in huge numbers in this years local elections, theyre in Council chambers up and down the country and theyll be on parliamentary ballot papers at the next general election too.

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Why socialists should join the Green Party #8: The Greens don't rig ... - Bright Green

The character of the Scottish independence movement has changed dramatically. Anyone that was part of the mass mobilisation ahead of the 2014 referendum could tell you it was a palpably dynamic movement and a wholly energetic and exciting period to live through. Debate was happening everywhere. Working-class people were exercising their agency. The movement symbolised the hope of an alternative to a society dictated to us from an institution so far removed from the lives of ordinary Scottish people.

The movement was also a space for the development of radical ideas, and the demand for popular sovereignty was a major rebellion against the establishment that had not been for seen decades. It was a movement that thrived in its democratic nature, encompassing broad coalitions and grassroots activism. The growth of civic engagement with politics was completely at odds with the dusty, electoral politics that had dominated the British landscape for so long. And so for many socialists, as a movement organised around class issues and set to undermine the power of British imperialism, the potential of the independence movement was clear.

This brings us to the present moment. The party that was elected on the back of this popular movement is in disarray. Polls suggest the appetite for independence is in decline, and despite various mandates, no coherent strategy for independence has been put forward by the governing party since the last referendum took place. Every strategy put forward by the SNP, including all three candidates bidding to be the next leader, fails to address the obvious constitutional stalemate with Westminster. Furthermore, Nicola Sturgeon leaves behind the remnants of a highly centralised party that lacks any democratic accountability to its members, let alone the electorate.

The movement is thus a shadow of its former self, having had nothing concrete to organise around, and no direction from the party which claims to represent it. Sadly, its democratic spirit has been stifled by an opaque Scottish establishment. Indeed, the radical tendencies of the movement, not least its traditions in the peace movement, have been captured by a party that, despite its progressive language, has done nothing to represent the interests of the working class whose votes took them to the top of Scottish politics. Truthfully, it is a fantasy to imagine that the SNP has brought us any closer to independence or that independence is on the cards in the near future as a practical reality.

In order to understand how we have arrived at this moment of political turmoil, it is first important to clarify the character of the SNP and to take a closer look at the partys nine years in government since the referendum. The SNP was propelled to electoral dominance on a wave of populism and anti-establishment conviction derived from the independence movement. Since then, it has sought to both capitalise on these credentials as well as imbed itself within existing national and transnational establishments. This inherent contradiction has manifested itself in many of their policies, a large proportion of which have managed to be as nonsensical as they have been uninspiring. For example, the SNPs vision for independence includes the policy of sterlingisation (Scotland would keep the pound after independence), which would tie Scotland to UK financial institutions indefinitely. In this case, our monetary policy would literally be governed by the Bank of England, thus undermining any genuine conception of sovereignty. This policy alone is indicative of the Scottish governments wish to avoid a genuine rupture with the British establishment. Indeed, you might ask, what would be the point of independence then?

Furthermore, in the process of promoting relationships with institutions of foreign capital, the Scottish government has deliberately pandered to the corporate lobby, choosing to price out community groups, activist projects and even charities at their conferences, meaning only think tanks and private interests are able to bend the ear of power. No exceptions are made even for their own membership; a motion from the SNPs own trade-union group to discuss how the Scottish Governments tax powers could be used to help alleviate the cost-of-living crisis was excluded from last years conference.

Moreover, the SNPs obsession with re-entering the European Union fails to hold up under the mildest scrutiny: the EU requires members to have a national, independently run central bank, with its own currency, as a prerequisite for membership. And finally, the Scottish Governments foreign-policy agenda for an independent Scotland is even more worrying: the cornerstone of its [Scotlands] defence policy said a member of the SNP defence team will be Nato membership. This indicates a clear subversion of the movements long-held peace tradition, which was recently centred around scrapping Trident. This tradition has thus been trampled on by a party so far removed from its own base that when push comes to shove, it is more than likely the SNP would choose to keep weapons on the Clyde to secure membership in Natos aggressive international military alliance.

Unfortunately, the customary argument that these policies and practices could easily be undone as soon as independence is delivered is unrealistic. The SNPs prospectus would serve as the negotiating platform from which Scotland would begin if an independence vote was successful, with the way the Scottish Government has been functioning up until this point being a firmly established precedent.

The SNP would also be looked to as overseers of any negotiating process. In addition, challenging the might of British institutions that are desperate to preserve the union, will be an endeavour that will require serious energy and momentum on the part of the movement. A momentum that surely cannot exist if it fails to see itself in the vision for which it is fighting. If independence is no different to what currently exists, independence is frankly not worth having. It is a risk and to carry it through, we need to know it is a serious alternative to the status quo.

It is a reasonable question, then, to ask does the SNP even want independence? Yes, many SNP politicians are likely to support independence as a concept, yet ultimately, the ruling party is unwilling to direct any serious confrontations with establishment institutions that could lead to it. Remember, it is not directly in anyones interests apart from our own to upset the international arrangement of power.

However, the SNPs lack of party democracy also mirrors a democratic deficit in Scottish society more generally in which the hollowing out of civic society has been symptomatic of the neoliberal era. Whilst part of a longer-term trend, the gap between people and politics has been widened by the managerial style of the leading party, the current settlement being propped up by the party in power.

Meanwhile, the SNPs disastrous domestic record provides little hope that they can deliver on their primary policy. The education attainment gap has grown wider, their national care system has been a catastrophe, and hundreds of elderly people have died unnecessarily at the hands of the Scottish Government during the pandemic. Despite pressure from their own membership, the national energy company that was announced in 2017 is yet to materialise. The Scotwind scandal saw the Scottish government eagerly auctioning off Scotlands offshore wind resources to multinational corporations like BP and Shell.

This record alone illustrates a party that is all talk and no substance, and these policies (and lack thereof) are illustrative of their priorities. These lie with the corporate lobby, British and international institutions, certainly not with the interests of the working class. Unfortunately however, for much of the SNPs time in government, their failure to address serious economic issues has been able to hide behind a weak anti-Tory facade and socially progressive language. Similarly, their insistence on unity around the party for the sake of independence has been an efficacious ploy to mask deeper class conflicts within society.

A cursory glance at any strategy for independence also fails to hold up under scrutiny. Sturgeons so-called de facto referendum, and the leadership candidates analogous variants, rest upon the assumption that the British Government will concede to a further independence vote, yet fails to address the reality that whoever holds power at Westminster has no incentive to grant one. This apparent lack of political substance goes some way to explaining why the party has arrived at this current moment of chaos: the SNP has had no serious long-term strategy beyond a victory at each election.

Independence is therefore not on the agenda as a practical reality. Facing up to this uncomfortable truth is vital to understanding our current strategic position. Confronting the more general limitations of electoral politics is also a necessary step towards future mobilisations. As socialists, we argue that real change comes from below, it comes from mass movements and it comes from struggle; nothing meaningful is ever just handed to us. A personnel change will certainly not alter the current state of the movement.

Where then, can the left go in Scotland? Unfortunately, much of the Scottish left is tied up with the dominant neoliberal parties. For instance, some people will return to their traditional home of the Labour Party, although with little hope beyond pushing the Conservatives out. Some will stay in the SNP, either out of misguided loyalty to the independence movement or from a lack of anywhere else to go. Some have, and will, go to the Scottish Greens, attracted to their nods to social justice and anti-capitalist language of eco socialism. However, if nothing else, the last nine years has shown with startling clarity the real limitations of shallow reformist parties. There is now a persuasive argument to be made for socialists to join and work with other socialists in socialist organisations.

To conclude, this brings me to a few questions that seek to help shape the discussion this evening. Can we return to a point where there was a huge grassroots mobilisation shaping the terms of independence? Have we, in fact, missed our chance? Will independence benefit, or at least create avenues to benefit, the working class? In its current prospectus, probably not. So can we move towards a point where it could? Is now even the time to refocus our energy into rebuilding a movement when there is no clear time frame or point to rally around?

Whilst there is no clear road ahead, there is action that can be taken in the present. Socialists in Scotland can provide a sustained critique of the Scottish Government, which for too long has hidden behind the fallacy of imminent independence. We must also demand more than a marginally better situation than the Conservatives have created down south. We can continue to support and participate in the struggles in the streets and the workplaces, and through these we can exercise our agency and actively participate in democracy.

Ultimately, it is through these that we can work towards building politically conscious oppositional forces to institutions of power. A mobilised and politicised working class terrifies the state, and it is there that our collective power lies. With this power we can successfully take on both the Scottish and British establishments to achieve a Scotland that meets our demands.

Finally, this is why organisations like Counterfire are facilitating a space to have these discussions and debates.

Sophie Johnson draws on themes explored more thoroughly in Jonathon Shafis weekly newsletter Independence Captured

Counterfire is expanding fastas a website and an organisation. We are trying to organise a dynamic extra-parliamentary left in everypart of the country tohelp build resistance to the government and their billionaire backers. If you like what you have read and youwant to help, pleasejoin usor just get in touch by emailing[emailprotected]Now is the time!

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Scottish independence at the crossroads: A socialist response - Counterfire

Life should be great rather than long is a famous quote of Ambedkar. The 23 years of meaningful life of Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) is a fitting example of this idea of life. Today, after 92 years of his martyrdom, he is being greatly acknowledged as the most respected son of the soil by all irrespective of political affiliations whether Left, Right or Centrist.His statue was installed at the Indian Parliament in 2008. The Government of India has built a national martyrs memorial at HussainiWala on the bank of river Sutlej. India got this place in exchange for 12 villages with Pakistan in 1961. Both in India and Pakistan, the revolutionary life of Bhagat Singh and many of the stories, songs, dramas and films have become folk tales.Post Independent India has been engaged more on his ideas of India and its vital relevance to address many of the contemporary challenges. The socio-political ideas are available in the articles, letters, jail diary and leaflets written by him in the heyday of his extreme radical political activism. His ideas of India and political action were not merely limited to a case of revenge action against the colonial mighty British Empire of those days to counter the death of Lala Lajpat Ray who was protesting the Simon Commission and died due to brutal police action. Even freedom for him also was not just getting liberated from the yoke of the British. The idea of India for which he was committed to in the true spirit of a patriot is very much available in his writings and through his political actions of those days.In the year 1928, he wrote articles on the issues of untouchability and communalism for its complete eradication as these issues were the main stumbling block of social unity of the Indians. While discussing such urgent issues of national importance, he said, We have to decide that all human beings are equal and there is not at all any necessity for any gradation of human society based on birth or occupation. He said the untouchables were the main soldiers of Guru Gobind Singh and Chhatrapati Shivaji and they are the main organic proletariats of India. He was not fully in favour of any reform movement; rather he was engaged more in the act of a political action for a fundamental and revolutionary structural change in politics, economics and social life without any compromise with the outdated old ideas. He called for the unity of the untouchables as the most oppressed proletariats to move on the path of revolution for an all-out change.He was strongly opposing communalism in any form and arguing for the religious rights of every one of any religion or faith to enjoy equal rights in a multicultural and multi-religious country such as India. His most famous book was Why I am an atheist, written some time in 1930. In a long essay there he built a sustained argument that if we all want to build a progressive nation then we have to accept logic, argumentative mind, free thinking and mostly the atheist way of thinking. While building a nation the people have more of a role to play than the gods and goddesses, he said. Along with free thought, free thinking, a questioning mind and criticism, a revolutionary transformation in a society is possible, he said. No one even if the so-called Mahatma must not be above criticism and question, he said.The great views of Bhagat Singh were admired and supported by Periyar EV Ramasamy and he wrote an editorial in his magazine Kudi Arasu. Periyar said the ideas of Bhagat Singh were very much necessary for the country. Periyar translated the book Why I am an atheist into Tamil and published it for Tamil readers. Ambedkar opposed the injustice done to Bhagat Singh by the British Government of those days. He also wrote an article in the magazine Janata edited by him in defence of Bhagat Singh, Sukhadev Thapar and Sivaram Rajguru, the three famous martyrs at young age.Bhagat Singh also was influenced by the political developments of his time across the world, mostly by the socialist revolution of the former Soviet Union in 1917 and the later progress in the world. The political ideas of Karl Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin and many others on the same line influenced the young mind of Bhagat Singh. At a very young age, he was much worried and getting pained over the issues of suffering of the people in the lower ladder, especially about economic exploitation and inequality, social discrimination and about the inaction of the so called Governments representing the interest of the capitalist, feudal lords and imperialist forces.While clarifying his political position once in a meeting of young political workers, he said, I am not an extremist, I am a revolutionary and revolution means to change the present decadent society to a new social order based on ideas of socialism that ensures equality for all. The individualistic way of life and personal comfort has to be dismantled to become revolutionaries in politics.

Original post:
Bhagat Singh: A committed atheist, socialist - Daily Pioneer

NOTE: This post contains some plot spoilers for The Lord of The Rings and other Tolkien books.

In a fascinating recent blog post, economist Bryan Caplan highlights some similarities between standard socialist complaints about capitalism, and long-running fan claims that the giant Eagles didn't do enough to fight Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Most obviously, fans have long argued that the Eagles should have just flown the Ring of Power to Mount Doom and dropped it in, thus sparing the Fellowship of the Ring great suffering, and saving the may lives lost in the War of the Ring. The so-called "eagle plot hole" is a longstanding focus of debate.

Caplan lists some other things fans believe the Eagles should have done:

"Why didn't the eagles transport Gandalf everywhere instead of making him ride a horse?"

"Why didn't the eagles fight at Minas Tirith?"

"Why didn't the eagles fly Bilbo and the Dwarves straight to the Lonely Mountain?"

"Why didn't the eagles grab Azog from his command post in the Battle of the Five Armies and drop him to his death?"

Caplan suggests less criticism of the Eagles for what they could have done but didn't, and more gratitude for all the good they did do:

Give the eagles a break! The eagles are already doing a ton of great stuff for Middle Earth! They're giant eagles. Top of the food chain. They could easily just roost safely in their eyries and live out their lives in peace. Yet without asking for the slightest compensation, these heroic birds

saved Gandalf at Isengard,

fought the Nazgul at the Black Gate,

rescued the Dwarves from the trees when they were surrounded by Goblins and Wargs,

and delivered the coup de grace at the Battle of the Five Armies.

The eagles aren't perfect, but they are awesome. Instead of asking the eagles to do even more, how about a little freakin' gratitude?

It's worth adding that never once did the Eagles get rewarded for all the good they did. At the end of the Lord of the Rings, King Elessar (as Aragorn is now called) takes care to acknowledge and reward all the various humanoid peoples and races who fought against Sauron. But the Eagles get nothing.

Caplan applies similar reasoning to standard socialist attacks on markets:

I submit that this is a handy allegory for popular complaints about markets. They offer vastly greater benefits than the eagles of Tolkien. To start, these glorious markets

fill our stores with cornucopian wealth,

create endless new products,

endlessly improve the products we already have,

offer great convenience,

build massive amounts of spacious, comfortable housing,

pay salaries ten, twenty, a hundred times our physical needs,

offer a vast range of jobs: the whole continuum from low commitment to high commitment, low risk to high risk, low social interaction to high social interaction, low comfort to high comfort,

will pay you something to do practically anything,

incentivize the world's most creative and industrious people to share their gifts with the world,

while respecting the principle of voluntary consent. Truly, no one makes you shop at WalMart.

Yet in politics and popular culture, markets gets even less love than the eagles. Instead, we get childish complaints:

"Incomes aren't equal."

"Wealth isn't equal."

"This product could be better."

"Why can't this stuff be free?"

"My pay sucks."

"My co-workers suck."

"My boss sucks."

"We're so materialistic."

What makes such complaints about markets so childish?

First, most of them apply at least as well to every other economic system. Actually-existing socialism is anything but equal. Its products are notoriously crummy. The pay stinks. Lots of co-workers and bosses still suck. And the victims of socialist poverty are notoriously "materialistic" because they spend most of their time struggling to fulfill their basic material needs.

Second, the market itself offers practical solutions for many of the complaints. Free immigration and free construction are mighty battering rams against inequality. Don't like your pay, coworkers, or boss? Find a better match using the First Law of Wing-Walking. Given time and persistence, this Law totally works. Abhor materialism? It's easier to focus on the finer things in life if the coarser things in life are dirt cheap.

Like Tolkien's eagles, markets aren't perfect, but they are awesome.

Just as the peoples of Middle Earth are vastly better off with Eagles than without them, so real-world people are vastly better off with markets than would likely be the case with any other economic systems. Indeed, real-world socialism looks a lot like Mordor under the rule of Sauron. Ditto for real-world fascism and statist nationalism.

Caplan's line of argument doesn't work as well against people who agree free markets have great value, but argue we need marginal tweaks and constraints to make them better, or eliminate negative side-effects. For example, perhaps governments should do more to limit externalities, help the poor, or provide public goods. But it is a compelling point against wholesale rejections of free markets in favor of socialism and other such alternatives.

I will also take this opportunity to point out that the Eagles are even better than Caplan suggests. The main complaint against themthat they could have easily destroyed the Ring of Power by flying it to Mount Doomis totally unwarranted. The following is an adaptation of a 2017 Facebook post I wrote on this subject:

There is no "Eagle plot hole" because the Eagle plan was a terrible idea all along! Giant Eagles are very conspicuous. The Eye of Sauron would literally have seen the Eagle coming from a thousand miles away. He would surely have sent up his Nazgul to investigate; they would sense the presence of the Ring, and capture it.

If the Eagle somehow managed to evade the Nazgul and got to Mordor, Sauron (by that time aware of the presence of the Ring) would have ordered all the thousands of orcs in Mordor to shoot at it. If even one of them manages to put a lucky arrow or ballista bolt through the Eagle's eye, the game is up. Sending in a whole squadron of Eagles (as suggested in some variants of the plan) just makes them even more conspicuous, which means that Sauron would detect them sooner.

And, by the way, the Eagles could not defeat the Nazgul, even with the advantage of numbers, because the latter are immune to non-magical weapons (and, presumably, also non-magical talons and claws).

In addition, as Gandalf explains, the Ring is a major temptation for "those who have already a great power of their own." Giant Eagles are very powerful, and would be tempted to take the ring for themselves, much as Boromir was (only more so, because they are more powerful than he is). An Eagle could easily overpower the Ringbearer, then take the Ring and try to use it, thereby rendering itself visible to Sauron. This scenario also ends with Sauron recapturing the Ring (or at best with a corrupted Giant Eagle becoming the new Dark Lord).

In sum, the supposedly brilliant Eagle plan would have ended up handing the Ring to Sauron on a silver platter. The reason why Gandalf didn't bring it up at the Council of Elrond is that he would have been embarrassed to present such a stupid idea to the Elves and Rangers. He would surely have been laughed out of Rivendell! And the same fate should befall the fanboys who keep bringing this up.

Some may argue that this is still a plot hole because Tolkien did not explain in the book why this plan won't work. But he also didn't have the characters analyze every other possible hare-brained scheme for destroying the Ring, such as having Dwarven sappers tunnel into Mount Doom. No one claims that Tolkien's failure to address these theories is a plot hole. The same goes for the Eagle plan.

Continue reading here:
Capitalism, Socialism, and Fan Complaints About the Role of Giant Eagles in "The Lord of the Rings" - Reason

Illustration by Matt Chase / The Atlantic

During Barack Obamas first term, the American right became fixated on the supposed threats of communism and socialism. At the time, it felt like another weird throwback trend from the Cold War, along with flared jeans, gated reverb, or Jell-O molds. The proximate causes were clear enoughhuge government spending to bolster the economy (by, uh, bailing out banks, but whatever) and efforts to expand health-insurance coverageeven if fears of a coming socialist America were clearly overhyped.

Seen from today, that moment looks less like a quirky cyclical trend and more like the passing of an era. Wokeness has supplanted socialism as the primary bogeyman among conservative politicians and pundits. The eclipse is evident in Google search trends and Fox News time allocation, and it has also been on vivid display over the past week, as leading figures in the Republican Party and right-wing media have portrayed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a case of woke values undermining sound business practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting the profit motive. Complaints about bailouts have been mostly the province of the leftwhich objects not to government spending but to helping the wealthy.

As I wrote last week, the claim that DEI crashed SVB makes no sense and is based on practically no evidence. The swiftness with which prominent Republican politicians leaped on the narrative drew some puzzled reactions. My theory is that a large and growing number of prominent conservatives (politicians, media personalities, etc.) are incapable of even feigning fluency in fiscal policy because theyve been talking about culture war stuff nonstop for like eight years, my colleague McKay Coppins wrote on Twitter. Hes right, and the shift is less incidental than intentional, driven by currents both inside and outside of the political right.

[David A. Graham: Why Republicans are blaming the bank collapse on wokeness]

Part of this is because capitalism has wonor rather, it continues to win. Insofar as any real question exists about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, the population has long since reached stasis on it. Though self-described democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still prominent in the Democratic Party, Joe Bidens more moderate approach is what dominates the party now.

Two other changes have also pushed the socialism charge to the side, at least for the moment. First, after the initial pink scare of the early Obama years, both parties shifted their focus more toward racial politics, a dynamic that continues today. Second, the dominant faction in the Republican Party, embodied by Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, has abandoned its commitment to limited government, instead embracing a muscular role for the stateespecially in enforcing conservative cultural values against the progressive ones labeled as woke.

Defining what conservatives mean by wokeness is, as the writer Bethany Mandel learned the hard way this week, not easily done. For the purposes of discussion here, it also isnt necessary. Many people use the term in different ways, to describe a general constellation of progressive ideas on race, gender, and sexuality, but what matters is the fact that they are using it, and using it somewhat indiscriminately. After all, most of what an earlier generation of conservatives called socialism wasnt really socialist, either.

The term woke originates in Black slang and is popular in youth culture, both of which are helpful for understanding their interpretation on the right. The election of Obama, the nations first Black president, was briefly hailed as evidence that the United States had transcended race, a moment that was followed immediately by race reasserting its central role in American politics. The reaction to Obama included a huge spike in white identity politics (driven in part by rising immigration), openly racist rhetoric, and debates over police killings of people of color. Trump exploited this opportunity, making appeals to racial resentment one of the foremost elements of his campaign and presidency.

Although some characteristics of the wokeness discourse (including critiques of free speech, a focus on equitable outcomes, and critical race theory, the actual academic movement) are somewhat novel, much of the backlash to wokeness is just repackaged versions of old racial backlash (most notably the frequent use of critical race theory to mean practically any discussion of racism) or critiques of political correctness. Because woke vernacular, like support for progressive causes, is especially popular among younger people, wokeness has also become a battlefield for fighting old generational conflicts between the more liberal young and more conservative older generations.

In perhaps a more subtle shift, right-wing figures may be less inclined to complain about overweening state power because some conservatives have now embraced the possibilities of big government. One form this takes is support for entitlements. Paul Ryan, a dominant intellectual figure in the Obama-era GOP and a man who had dreamed of capping Medicaid since his keg-drinking days, is now a lone voice in the wilderness. Donald Trump beat the GOP presidential field in 2016 in part by promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and that view has become mainstream. This year, leading Republican figures in Congress vowed not to cut them, either, which is probably good politics though it renders their budget-slashing aims basically impossible. Fiscal conservatives find themselves marginalized in the party.

But some conservative politicians and pundits have also warmed to the idea of using the state to punish their ideological opponentsjust the sort of behavior they warned about under totalitarian communist regimes. Tucker Carlson, the rights leading media figure, endorses the use of the state to harass the COVID-cautious. DeSantis, a former Tea Party stalwart, has reinvented himself as a lite authoritarian, eager to wield government power to tell private companies how to conduct their business. Hes not alone. Republicans across the country are seeking ways to bully companies out of environmental, social, and governance approaches, deriding them as woke. The irony is that in many cases these companies are adopting the trappings of progressivism not out of any deep ideological commitment but instead because they see it as a business advantage.

Meanwhile, conservatives warning about censorship of conservative views have turned to speech codes and trying to force tech companies to host certain viewpoints at the insistence of the governmentoxymoronically pursuing censorship in order to save free speech from wokeness.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: You cant define woke]

Socialism has faded as a rallying cry because this conservative movement can hardly pretend to be horrified by big government, and it has learned that its voters arent especially interested in cutting spending programs, either, at least the ones that benefit them. Attacking wokeness fills that voidwe might even cheekily call this the GOPs successor ideologywith an alternative that is malleable enough to apply to nearly any situation. But as the SVB story demonstrates, the malleability is also a weakness. If wokeness is an explanation for everything, it is also an explanation for nothing. Although its a good way to gather a range of cultural resentments, it offers little in the way of policy ideas to improve lives, even in contrast to vague promises such as trickle-down economics. No one has yet provided any explanation of what an anti-woke bank-regulation regime might look likeand no one will. This is an attack suited to a party that exists only to campaign, with no interest in actually governing.

Link:
Wokeness Has Replaced Socialism as the Great Conservative Bogeyman - msnNOW