DiEM0216.Session 1. Arno-image. All rights reserved.For years
the signs have been on the wall. The Tea Party in the United States. Golden
Dawn in Greece. The Alternatif für Deutschland. UKIP’s inexorable rise in the
UK. Etc. etc. We saw these signs. We analysed their historic and political
causes. We developed a cosmopolitan narrative of how ‘another’ Europe,
‘another’ world is possible.
But,
unforgivably, we missed the most important thing about all this: that those on
the bottom of the social heap are consumed by Deep Discontent that leaves them
in no mood for complexity – they have no time for sophisticated, complicated
analyses, or for lofty political agendas.
Where we
failed, the Right succeeded: Right-wingers found a way to exploit the Deep
Discontent. And their solution was simple:
Simplicity!
What the nationalist, nativist Right offer is exactly this: SIMPLICITY
Millions of
working Americans feel they are destined for the scrapheap, discarded,
despised, neglected. We saw how they need nothing more than a big Trumpian wave
of the hand to imagine it is possible to get rid of all that is pressing them
down and once again hope for the future.
It’s so
totally understandable that they want that hope, and that they flock to anybody
who says they can restore it with a simple sentence:
TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR COUNTRY!
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
In a
media-saturated age, that sort of sound-bite sticks like shit to a shoe…while
all the whiffle and whaffle of us liberals, democrats, Marxists, utopians etc.
is just too vague and too conditional.
Things have
got so bad for the bottom end of society that they feel free in Janis Joplin’s
and Nikos Kazantzakis’ sense: Freedom as another word for nothing left to lose.
Indeed, they
are prepared to lose whatever they are left with if they can, in the process,
express their rage by voting for someone who will piss off those they consider
responsible for their loss of control.
It’s a
revolution all right, but not as we know it, not the one we wanted, envisaged,
or have any idea how to ride.
The facts
are simple but have never really been stated simply: for the past three
decades, 80% of the people are taken to the cleaners 95% of the time by the top
20% of society. Since the mid-1970s, once the first post-war capitalist phase
ended (with the collapse of the New Deal-inspired Bretton Woods system), those
relying on wage income to live have fallen off the escalator. Most of the gains
from technology, productivity, globalisation, have gone to the top 1% and none
to the bottom 80%. People can put up with poverty, but not with humiliation –
not with having their noses rubbed in their poverty by people in yachts, golf
clubs and Mercedes Benzes, telling them that their poverty is self-inflicted.
Worse still,
all conventional parties are offering slight variants of the system that has
failed this 80% of the people. We need to be much more radical than that to
entice them back, away from the sirens of the xenophobic Right.
What can we do
to reach those people? They are the foot-soldiers and we need their energy and
anger. But they’ve been corralled by lethal buffoons of the Right, like Boris
Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, who directed their
righteous anger at the wrong targets.
How can WE
re-engage those people?
For now,
this is an open question. Not one to be answered lightly or in haste. Brexit
should give us pause.
One thing
that is clear is that DiEM25 is now more important than ever. Our message from
the beginning was simple: The EU will either be democratised or it will
disintegrate!
Brexit has confirmed our point.
But our
message needs to be simplified further.
We need to
explain exactly what we mean by democratisation.
We need to
explain to those drawn by Trumpian/Brexiterian simplicity why democratising
Europe matters to them.
We need to
counter the Trumpian/Brexiterian simplicity with a simple (but not
oversimplified) message of our own.
In short, we
need to pitch progressive simplicity versus regressive oversimplification.
But, as we
all know, simplicity requires lots of (often complicated) work.
Let’s get
down to it.
First published on DiEM25 blog.
