Pearls and Irritations

Every time a fascist-flirting regime is defeated in an election, more column inches and podcast minutes are devoted to the sense that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. When Trump, Bolsonaro, Sunak’s Tories or the Law and Justice Party in Poland lose elections, the centrist commentariat breathes a sigh of relief, believing its priors to be confirmed. Their vision, however, is too short term: these are likely not to be fascistic deviations from a liberal democratic trajectory. Instead the electoral defeats promise to be temporary relief from the existential threat to “civilisation.”

The neoliberal project underway from the 1940s but truly gaining traction in the 1970s and 80s in the Thatcher/Reagan era was marketed as selling freedom to succeed. In fact, the program was effectively neofeudal. The ultra-rich were in the process of using their charitable foundations to fund projects to remake the law to serve their desires, not the common wealth.

The oligarchs would have freedom from tax and “red tape.” This meant the public would have “freedom” from services such as decent healthcare and education, maintained bridges, roads and, ultimately, staffed services like air traffic controllers and the weather bureau. The public would also have “freedom” from decent working conditions, safe consumables, clean air and water.

The protests that would inevitably result would need to be crushed to prevent interruptions to profits.

The pain created for the vast majority of the public has been immense. Wages have stalled since the neoliberal project gained traction. (CEO remuneration, by contrast, has skyrocketed. Another of the neoliberal activists’ scams was the notion that meteoric executive pay equalled profits.) The middle class has shrivelled, and the precariat grown.

This pain provides a deep well of energy to be mined. Historian Timothy Snyder refers to the process as a function of sado-populism. The more pain generated in the population, the more energy available to breed hate of selected targets. Naturally the oligarchs’ spin doctors make sure the targets are not themselves as the true cause of the pain, but instead vulnerable minority groups.

A system built on maintaining a pool of unemployed so that the poorest workers are frightened to make waves cleverly depicts the unemployed and working poor as moral failures without the diligence to succeed in a society that has actively trapped the vast majority of them in place.

The private education system has boomed: those that can afford it can boost their own children into the enabler class. The public education system has been cut to bare bones: the Civil Rights era proved the threat to the oligarchs of an educated populace without enough debt to chain it to the grind.

In America, the Right is trying to destroy the public education system entirely. Public school education has been hard to control: students have learnt inconvenient facts about societies built on injustice and about climate science. In the post-public school era, anyone who can’t afford to be educated at private or compliant church school can be trapped in poverty-wage labour, replacing deported migrants.

The oligarchs’ spin doctors are replicating this campaign in Australia with the “charter school” movement as their initial fight.

Oligarchs and their spin doctors disguise the dehumanising campaigns against the poor and against vulnerable minorities as “virtue” and “patriotism” instead of the unmerited bigotry it truly is.

The creation of a separate “reality,” where migrants are rampantly committing crimes, Antifa is burning down our cities and abortion doctors are murdering full-term babies, is a mutually isolated space from fact-based civil society. Neither of us sees what the other knows. This allows Trump to win the popular vote in 2024 against expectation.

In this world, climate change is a rort inflicted on us by a “them” that might be Jews or leftists. Any pain inflicted by climate catastrophes – whether a single disaster or inflationary pressures on strained food production – fuels the energy that drives the movement. Conspiracies held by both the undereducated and the partisan explain that the “left” in government is manipulating the weather to hurt their political enemies, or maybe it is Jewish space lasers.

The fact that the climate crisis has only begun to generate the massive numbers who will be displaced as their homelands become uninhabitable is providing an exponentially-growing reservoir of hate and fear to be siphoned.

Meanwhile both fossil fuel and disaster capitalism more broadly have massive profits opened up to them by melting icecaps and local catastrophe. They have no intention to divert course. The neoliberal project is literally driving us towards “civilisational collapse.”

The oligarchs’ iron grip on career politicians, preventing them acting on the popular will, leads to burning outrage and merited disdain.

In the world inhabited by the radicalising Right, it is not the oligarchs that are hurting them, but minorities. In this world it is not poor health care, inadequate education or guns that are hurting children; it is the existence of LGBTQIA+ people.

In this world, women’s autonomy is a threat to the moral order. Firstly women are to be stripped of the right to control what happens to their bodies. They must engage in sexual activity only within sacred marriage with the intent to be impregnated. Then Project 2025 plans that women will be robbed of the right to gain divorce from toxic marriages. Some are strategising to strip women of the right to vote.

Here the Christian Right, gathered so closely around Trump, gains support from the toxic cyber space known as the manosphere. There violent misogyny, homophobia and racism breed a toxic poison that is poured into the ears of disaffected young men around the world for hours on end in podcasts, YouTube and on social media. This is not a fringe movement: it is inherent to the tech-bro mindset that shapes social media platforms and now the American government.

The billionaire tech-bros’ social media platforms in all their variety have replaced mainstream media as the generator of reality. Mainstream media, meanwhile, has earned the deep cynicism that has resulted from its many failures and accompanied its flailing efforts to retain relevance and financial sustainability in the internet era. The strongest surviving media platforms are those owned and deployed by oligarchs intent on manufacturing the reality they need.

The oligarchs’ media, their spin operations such as the Atlas Network, and their online operations are not bound by truth or decency or good faith. They are splattergun operations that shoot muck at a wall to see what sticks. Humour, cruelty and disingenuousness are easy to deploy when all that matters is victory, power and profit.

The coalition of conspiracists, misogynists, and Religious Right theocrats is being coalesced into a voting bloc that does not care that it is voting for its own immiseration. The oligarchs funnel torrents of money into the project that gives them the political power to shape their world to their desires.

People who care about the wellbeing of the community and the world’s population more broadly look laughably earnest to the cackling mass of disaffected. Politicians who do offer policy find themselves discredited by oligarch spin as “socialists” or “woke.” Furthermore, in sado-populism policy no longer matters: oligarchs have created a world that has lost faith in the power of government to help them.

Since 2020, the combined wealth of the US’s 614 billionaires has almost doubled, extracting USD2.947 trillion dollars from the common wealth. Neoliberal strategising has served them well: in America, they have stripped every constraint from their ability to extract wealth without interference and have directed the pain against the powerless.

Every extra hurt experienced by the public fuels the Right’s political machine and supercharges oligarchs’ wealth acquisition.

Anthony Albanese’s government needs to make some truly dramatic decisions that can pierce the walls that separate realities. Without genuine efforts to address community anger about such blights as profiteering supermarkets or climate inaction, the trap made for them by the oligarchs will be sprung.

Then, we too will return to the fascist-trending politics of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.

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