Where do we go from here?

This essay has been prompted by the spate of recent articles and posts all pointing out that we are in a new world. There has been an outporing of angst picking up on two things; the international environment seems to have shifted and in many countries the far right is making headway. One commentator was prompted to ask the question, have we already lost the war?  [Trigger]  and defined the war as the asault of neoliberalism on democracy.

I agree that reading the news has become grim and depressing and that many people seem discombobulated. And yes there is a campaign against any meaningful form of social contract recruting for suport the very people who need one. Some might call it a class war [Class and War] . What I want to do here is suggest ways to resist, and above all I want to say keep the faith and don’t despair. 

Someone that many of us would regard as an enemy articulated it very well. Milton Friedman  “There is enormous inertia—a tyranny of the status quo—in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” [Crisis and Change]  

For the crisis in the USA the ideas that are lying around are those of the libertarian right, and they are deeply undemocratic. They  are the technology oligarchs supporting Trump - they always said they should "move fast and break things", now they have hitched this wagon to Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" - the idea being that there is so much going on people will be unable to keep up - I think of it as a form of political blitzkreig.

There many crises going on in all parts of the world. They are occurring simultaneously, the term polycrisis has been used and is gaining some definition  [Polycrisis] . Outside the western bubble the political manifestatio of this may be what you'd expect; competition for resources, authoritarianism and nationalism, but for us the politics is more complex. Many of the ideas lying around are, those extreme libertarian views come from the likes of the Tufton Street think tanks, The Heritage Foundation’s project 2025 and books like The Sovereign Individual. If we read their ideas we can see that elements of the super-rich and their willing accomplices are attempting nothing short of ushering in a new feudalism in the chaos caused by social media. It’s not an accident that real wages in the US have stagnated since the 1970’s. This is not a conspiracy as such but it is a deliberate, coordinated, networked and funded assault on any reasonable social contract. [The ideas lying around]

If I may use this term broadly “the left” has not done its work properly and let us all down. Now that the assault on democracy is gathering pace it doesn’t seem to have any idea of how resist. It does not articulate the alternative, it does not engage in political education or very much in persuasion. In the battle of ideas LINO (Labour in Name Only) appears to have capitulated; any semblance of being for ordinary people is belied by its actions, it is beguiled by TINA (There is No Alternatice) and blind to or blindsided by what is actually happening. It clings to technocratic fixes and trickle down using the framing of its enemies. [Ambition]