January 23, 2017

When You Open Your Heart to Patriotism, There Is No Room for Prejudice

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

So we had it - the most unintelligible, rambling, tawdry opening to the big guy's Presidency which we all feared, and which none of us expected. Donald Trump is now king of the world - make no doubt about it, being President in a post-Cold-War era is the closest one can come to assuming a title and power of such Biblical proportions. He commands the most advanced military in the world. He is the head of the largest surveillance network in the world. He is in charge of the most enormous economy the world has ever seen. 

Although politics may simply be smoke and mirrors for more commanding and aggressive commercial interests, there is no doubt that political offices still hold immense power, both real and symbolic. What Trump does and says matters. What we do and say matters too. 

In this regard, I want to write about the people, today. Not about the tweets and the crowd sizes, not about Breitbart and Milo, not about the Nazis and the terrorists. I just want to write about the ordinary people, who live in socially-liberal, economically neoliberal, Western countries. 

For a long time, I've tried to recommend the idea that people need to be appealed to, and they need to be recognized as human beings, rather than simply demonized and cut-off. A decent example of this would be Pegida - although people in Pegida seem to me be following a completely misguided idea, I still try to recognize that there are human beings there, who have turned to this kind of belief for many reasons. One of those reasons is fear - another is anger. Another of those is, sometimes, complete racism. But just another reason is the failure of the left. 

What has the left failed to do? It's failed to build a solid narrative which appeals to people's better natures, and provides them with a rewarding, and encouraging sense of identity. Partially, this is economic: Many of these people come from former working class, lower-middle and middle class backgrounds. Partially, it is ethnic: the majority of these people are ethnically White European. Partially, it is to do with age: Much of these groups are made up of people between the ages of 35-70. In other words, these are ageing people, who tend to have limited work and educational opportunities, who are white.

They perceive that they are now on the losing side of history. Indeed, much of this perception is simply false - the gains made by minority groups do not preclude the privileges this group already has. But, this perception does have some grounding in reality - these people have been simply abandoned by technocratic neoliberalism, and furthermore, have been to some extent, sidelined by popular culture which treats them as stupid and backward. With no strong, united, internationalist alternative, no wonder these people went over to the dark side of nationalism. So much so, that we have the President of the United States of America saying: When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. 

As if. His form of patriotism is prejudice. 

But the alternative does not need to be. The left needs to build bridges to these people, quickly, and offer them an alternative vision for the future - one which offers a more generous and encompassing view of nationhood, which doesn't resort to crass stereotypes, and doesn't use the language of the right. 

This means acknowledging and amending the wrongs of neoliberalism. It also means incorporating identity into the idea of a milieu - trying to build social solidarity through pluralism, and the understanding that our social spaces are made up of projections - that we can positively create harmonious social environments by thinking differently about ourselves and one another. This will help to counteract the idea that whites are losing to blacks, and build the idea that everyone is having a better time. 

Alas I get a knot in my stomach when I think about it - last year I thought there's no way Trump would win or that Brexit would happen. And now I feel almost helpless in the face of possible victories for Wilders, Le Pen, Petry etc. But they will only win if the left fails to offer people a viable alternative to nationalist carnage. Such alternatives exist - we simply have to have the courage to undo the knots in our stomachs, and fight back.