anon_jixa said in #5559 7h ago:
A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has attempted to ban Renan Santos from campaigning on a selectively enforced technicality (though backed down). The German state constantly flirts with the idea of banning AfD, the most popular opposition party. In response to the Bondi beach massacre by muslim immigrants, the Australian government declared all criticism of muslims or immigration to be illegal "hate speech", and banned organizations and jailed dissidents that spoke about it. In response to rising problems with mass immigration, the Canadian state has recently been interfering with the anti-immigration Dominion Society, going as far as to send police to intimidate businesses to deter anyone from doing business with them. The UK now has the distinction of making more arrests for speech offenses every year (approx. 12000) than any other modern power (though thankfully not convictions). In the US, judges continue to obstruct attempts to enforce immigration and criminal law, though they have mostly given up trying to block opposition as such.
The whole point of democracy, taught to us as the gospel according to the UN in our youth, is that it internalizes political tension and potential power struggles into a lawful and legitimate process within neutral institutions, thereby avoiding revolutionary chaos and civil war. So the theory goes that when something is wrong in the governance of society, and many can see it and feel it, we can always organize to correct our problems within the system. The end of the messy history of political struggle and the dawn of our utopian star-trek future. Genius!
But the system seems to want to go back on this deal. Some of the defining political problems of our time, in particular mass immigration and redistributive corruption, have been in various ways placed beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. Our predecessors set up a mythology of paradoxical need for intolerant taboos on certain discussions, and our system now takes controversial and questionable actions under the cover of those taboos, and declares all protestation to be beyond the pale and unacceptable in a civilized society. It's a procedural "infinite power glitch": just declare your normal political rivals enemies of humanity, democracy, science, decency, and the state, and you can loot all you want without opposition. Genius!
This is obviously a contradiction with the former legitimacy narrative of democratic elites. As such, they are resorting to more nakedly politicized legal force justified by new punitive legitimacy narratives to legitimize the implicit disenfranchisement of their historical citizenry. For example, the Canadian state has declared its traditional population to be guilty of genocide and their land illegally occupied. In Europe, the mass immigration welfare state is often explicitly legitimized as punishment for past colonizations. In the US, recent attempts have been made to demand racialized reparations for past slavery, and to upend society for egalitarian civil rights law.
My point here isn't to gripe, but to characterize our historical moment:
1. The post-war liberal-democratic political contract is breaking down in refusal to internalize certain kinds of increasingly salient disagreement, returning us to norms of illiberal revolutionary chaos.
2. The specific axis of revolutionary disagreement is between a complex of mass immigration, criminality, and corruption in the position of the establishment on the left, and something like the traditional social contract of nationhood now radicalized by a revolutionary political position on the right.
This analysis is crude, but gives us enough to clarify our intellectual mandate: we need to investigate and tell the story of both sides, both the foreign-inflected corruption (eg Minnesota Somali daycares) and the revolutionary nationalism (eg remigration and radical anticorruption politics). The politics of the next century depends on how this resolves.
The whole point of democracy, taught to us as the gospel according to the UN in our youth, is that it internalizes political tension and potential power struggles into a lawful and legitimate process within neutral institutions, thereby avoiding revolutionary chaos and civil war. So the theory goes that when something is wrong in the governance of society, and many can see it and feel it, we can always organize to correct our problems within the system. The end of the messy history of political struggle and the dawn of our utopian star-trek future. Genius!
But the system seems to want to go back on this deal. Some of the defining political problems of our time, in particular mass immigration and redistributive corruption, have been in various ways placed beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. Our predecessors set up a mythology of paradoxical need for intolerant taboos on certain discussions, and our system now takes controversial and questionable actions under the cover of those taboos, and declares all protestation to be beyond the pale and unacceptable in a civilized society. It's a procedural "infinite power glitch": just declare your normal political rivals enemies of humanity, democracy, science, decency, and the state, and you can loot all you want without opposition. Genius!
This is obviously a contradiction with the former legitimacy narrative of democratic elites. As such, they are resorting to more nakedly politicized legal force justified by new punitive legitimacy narratives to legitimize the implicit disenfranchisement of their historical citizenry. For example, the Canadian state has declared its traditional population to be guilty of genocide and their land illegally occupied. In Europe, the mass immigration welfare state is often explicitly legitimized as punishment for past colonizations. In the US, recent attempts have been made to demand racialized reparations for past slavery, and to upend society for egalitarian civil rights law.
My point here isn't to gripe, but to characterize our historical moment:
1. The post-war liberal-democratic political contract is breaking down in refusal to internalize certain kinds of increasingly salient disagreement, returning us to norms of illiberal revolutionary chaos.
2. The specific axis of revolutionary disagreement is between a complex of mass immigration, criminality, and corruption in the position of the establishment on the left, and something like the traditional social contract of nationhood now radicalized by a revolutionary political position on the right.
This analysis is crude, but gives us enough to clarify our intellectual mandate: we need to investigate and tell the story of both sides, both the foreign-inflected corruption (eg Minnesota Somali daycares) and the revolutionary nationalism (eg remigration and radical anticorruption politics). The politics of the next century depends on how this resolves.
A Brazilian Supreme