#Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that, ‘Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.’ But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published in the Journal of Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5 per cent of the world’s population growth and just 2.4 per cent of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4 per cent of the extra people, but 14 per cent of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one-sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one-seventh of the transport fuel of households earning 30,000 rupees or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development, points out that the old formula taught to all students of development – that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I = PAT) – is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I = CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t figure in this equation. They are the ones who have the most children.

While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a look at a few superyachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain politicians in the style to which they’re accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 litres of fuel per hour. But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3,400 litres of fuel per hour when travelling at 60 knots. That’s nearly one litre per second. Another way of putting it is thirty-one litres per kilometre.

Of course to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jet-skis and a minisubmarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in ten minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the Lower Thames Valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3,000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super-wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

In May 2009, The Sunday Times carried an article headlined ‘Billionaire Club in Bid to Curb Overpopulation’. It revealed that ‘some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly’ to decide which good cause they should support. ‘A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.’ The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it? It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich.

—excerpted from How Did We Get Into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

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The term “culture war” or “cultural war” can be traced back to 1992, when far-right Patrick Buchanan ran against President George H.W. Bush in a bitter, divisive GOP primary before railing against Democratic nominee Bill Clinton during the general election. Speaking at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Buchanan declared that the United States was facing a “cultural war” in which liberals and conservatives had radically different visions for the country.

Buchanan told the crowd, “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.”

Back then, Buchanan was considered a fringe figure in the GOP, but his ideas later found a home in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the MAGA movement. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is often described as one of the Republican Party’s most prominent “culture warriors.”

But in an article published by The Guardian on February 14, philosopher Jason Stanley objects to DeSantis’ agenda being called a “culture war.” Trying to eliminate ideas one disagrees with, Stanley argues, is not about waging a vigorous debate — it is “fascism” and naked authoritarianism.

“A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States,” Stanley explains. “Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of ‘divisive concepts,’ and 18 states have passed them. Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that ‘a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex’…. Administrators and teachers have been forced out of their positions on the suspicion of violating these laws, and what has started as a trickle may soon become a flood.”

Stanley adds that in January, the Florida Board of Education, with DeSantis’ blessing, banned an advance-placement African-American studies course from public high schools on the grounds that it violated the Stop Woke Act of 2022.

“These laws have been represented by many as a ‘culture war,’” Stanley writes. “This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators’ speech are no such thing — unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy.”

Laws like Florida’s Stop Woke Act, according to Stanley, don’t promote a competition of ideas — their goal is to repress ideas that DeSantis and other MAGA Republicans are uncomfortable with.

“Most frighteningly, these laws are meant to intimidate educators, to punish them for speaking freely by threatening their jobs, their teaching licenses, and more,” Stanley warns. “The passing of these laws signals the dawn of a new authoritarian age in the United States, where the state uses laws restricting speech to intimidate, bully and punish educators, forcing them to submit to the ideology of the dominant majority or lose their livelihoods, and even their freedom.”

Stanley adds, “It is clear that the chief agenda of the GOP is to advance a set of speech laws that criminalize discussion in schools of anything but the white heterosexual majority’s perspective. The media’s portrayal of these laws as moves in the ‘culture wars’ is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism.”

Read The Guardian’s full article at this link.

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As President, when told the January 6 insurrectionists wanted to “hang Mike Pence,” Donald Trump reportedly told advisors that perhaps his vice president “deserves” it. On the campaign trail, and even as far back as 2018, Trump has called for the death penalty for anyone convicted of selling drugs. And as President, Trump oversaw the largest number of federal executions in more than 120 years.

If elected again to the White House, a President Trump would install mass executions, including by firing squad, hanging, and possibly even guillotine, according to a report by Rolling Stone.

“What do you think of firing squads?” Trump has repeatedly asked close associates, Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Patrick Reis report, citing several sources. Trump has even “mused about televising footage of executions, including showing condemned prisoners in the final moments of their lives.”

Trump has railed against President Joe Biden, publicly and privately, but in private he appears to lament he did not have enough time in office to greatly expand the death penalty.

“Trump privately mused about the possibility of creating a flashy, government-backed video ad campaign that would accompany a federal revival of these execution methods,” Rolling Stone report, referring to firing squads, hangings, and guillotine. “In Trump’s vision, these videos would include footage from these new executions, if not from the exact moments of death.”

“The [former] president believes this would help put the fear of God into violent criminals,” one source told Rolling Stone. “He wanted to do some of these [things] when he was in office, but for whatever reasons didn’t have the chance.”

A former Trump White House official told Rolling Stone, “In conversations I’d been in the room for, President Trump would explicitly say that he’d love a country that was totally an ‘eye for an eye’ — that’s a direct quote — criminal justice system, and he’d talk about how the ‘right’ way to do it is to line up criminals and drug dealers before a firing squad.”

That official also quoted Trump as saying, “You just got to kill these people.”

In 2019 VICE published a compilation of “Trump’s Long Love Affair With the Death Penalty.”

Watch below or at this link.

Richard Wolin Prologue In a 2018 interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Steve Bannon – Donald Trump’s former campaign manager and chief political strategist, who, in 2016, quipped that he wanted to make Breitbart News a “platform for the Alt-Right” – exalted Martin Heidegger as an intellectual inspiration and role model. The journalist who conducted the interview, […]

During Super Bowl Sunday’s array of ads, one campaign sought not to promote cars or sports betting or a snack food, but Jesus himself.

One ad, exhibiting black-and-white photos of civil rights protests, Covid-19 lockdown demonstrations, and numerous other nondescript confrontations, was marched forward to the tune of “Human” by Rag’n’Bone Man. Encounters that flattened everyone (whether protesting against wearing masks in a pandemic or against police brutality) into misguidedly angry individuals were paired with lyrics like “Take a look in the mirror, and what do you see, do you see it clearer, or are you deceived? … Cause I’m only human after all, you’re only human after all.”

The music faded, the screen cut to black. “Jesus loved the people we hate,” the screen read. Cue the music’s powerful return. “He gets us. All of us,” the ad continued, before “us” was then transposed to “Jesus.”

The stirring ad was part of the larger “He Gets Us” campaign bankrolled by the conservative evangelical group Servant Foundation. The ad, urging viewers to look beyond their apparently equally valid differences and instead find solidarity through the church, did not come from a group that even pretends to follow such hollow advice.

As Andrew Perez reported at The Lever, the Servant Foundation donated more than $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization that helped draft the Mississippi abortion law at the core of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Fresh off that victory, they’re seeking to block the abortion drug mifepristone.

The group is also leading a Supreme Court case that argues businesses should be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ+ customers. The organization previously argued in the 2018 Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that involved a baker who refused to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples.

A 2020 tax return showed that the nearly $1 billion asset-holding Servant Foundation’s top contributions were to the Alliance Defending Freedom, according to Lever.

The “He Gets Us” campaign also received money from donors like Hobby Lobby billionaire co-founder David Green, who sued the government to overturn Obamacare’s contraception mandate for company coverage due to “religious objections.” The court ruled in 2014 that Hobby Lobby could in fact deny contraceptive coverage to its employees. Green’s Hobby Lobby warehouses were also ordered to return thousands of Iraqi artifacts “collected” by the tycoon to adorn the Museum of the Bible, which Green is a primary funder of and tax write-off benefactor of.

“He Gets Us” also ran an ad earlier in the Super Bowl urging viewers to be more childlike, since “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults.” The Super Bowl ads are part of a larger campaign; another “He Gets Us” ad positions Jesus as an influencer “canceled” by the “establishment.”

Another ad produced by the billionaire-backed organization veers toward poverty porn, reminding us that “Jesus struggled to make ends meet, too.”

This article was originally published by Contretemps on 28 October 2022.

The rise of the far right is a global wave, rooted in the crises and contradictions of capitalism in our time. This is at least the argument of Ugo Palheta in his latest book, La Nouvelle Internationale fasciste, in which he insists that far-right movements – no matter how nationalistic they may be – not only inspire each other, but organise themselves on an international scale, building a common understanding across borders that is essentially based on the hatred of equality. The present historical moment is thus marked by the emergence and rise of a ‘new fascist international’, which can only be stopped by the construction of an International of the oppressed, rooted in the struggles already present. We offer here an excerpt from Palheta’s book, which investigates the conditions in which neo-fascisms, these nationalisms of purification, are able to prosper.

Neo-fascism is already a global force. A ‘magnetic field’ of neo-fascisms has formed, allowing them to attract both large sections of the population and entire sectors of the political and media elites seeking a new hegemony. This force of attraction varies in intensity from one country to another, depending on their history, the resistance that neo-fascism meets, the susceptibility of the dominant classes to radical nationalism, the penetration of racist and authoritarian ideas in the population, etc. But the neo-fascist dynamic is global because it stems from a phenomenon that developed in parallel with the advent of neoliberal capitalism and its subsequent crisis. A multifaceted crisis: social, economic, environmental, and of course political.

The political crisis is not a function of the personality of this or that national leader, of corruption scandals here or there, of bad choices made by some people, or of other situational and contingent aspects of the prevailing policy. It refers to the long-term effects of the policies of privatisation, precarisation and dispossession imposed for decades by the ruling classes everywhere in the world (at different rates depending on the resistance they have encountered). Such a political crisis has the breadth, or the depth, of a crisis of hegemony: a crisis of political representation, in the sense that most of the political parties that engaged in the great neoliberal destruction have lost a considerable part of their legitimacy and their social base, or have even completely collapsed; a crisis of belief in political institutions, marked by increasing rates of abstention everywhere; a crisis of all the mediations between the dominant classes and the rest of the population (not least the crisis of the press and the dominant media); as well as a crisis of the project carried by these classes since the end of the 1970s, namely the neoliberal project.

This project promised to free individuals from all the constraints that prevented them from realising their full potential, from being ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’, from proving their talent or merit, in short, from becoming self-made entrepreneurs capable of making their capital (small or large, material or human) bear fruit. Taxing both companies and rich individuals less was supposed to stimulate the production of wealth, which would then ‘trickle down’ from the top to the bottom of the social ladder; everyone would thus benefit from renewed growth. Instead of these phantasmagorias, which shaped a whole individualist, productivist and commercial imaginary, what we had was a new phase of capital accumulation, privatisation (or degradation) of public services, destruction of the environment and further enrichment of the wealthiest. In particular, it meant subjecting workers to the most ruthless competition and placing the state at the fullest service of the logic of maximum short-term profit, to the detriment of the majority, of nature and also of productive investments (especially in infrastructures useful to the whole population).

The neoliberal project was intended to be hegemonic, to shape consent to the social order by creating a new common sense and by arousing new affects, after the historical period that economists had described as ‘Fordist’, based on a social compromise between classes, strong unions, an increase in social rights, a sharing of wealth that was less unfavourable to employees, etc. If the neoliberal project has undeniably been successful (from its own point of view) in undermining everything that was collective and public, it is now in tatters because its double promise of generalised abundance and liberation has never been kept. On the contrary, populations are massively confronted with precariousness and alienation, especially the young, women and racial minorities. This has led to a crisis of hegemony that has deepened as neoliberal policies have taken effect, as inequality has increased, as the signs of indecent wealth for a small minority have become more and more stark, as whole sections of the population have been unable to make ends meet, and as governments have become ever more obviously the proxies of the possessing class.

It is at this point that neo-fascism enters the scene, as a political force called on to take over from neoliberalism in terms of hegemony. What is not understood when fascism is reduced to armed gangs, or the militarisation of politics is that it is not simply a set of repressive techniques or methods of intimidation but a political project with a hegemonic vocation. Fascism doesn’t just bludgeon, it seduces. And, from this point of view, its power lies in the fact that it can appeal to all classes:

— to a section of the elites, who understand that neoliberalism has run its course (not as an economic doctrine but as a political project);

— to the middle and lower-middle classes, who are afraid of being downgraded and hate diversity (for themselves or their children);

— and to fringes of the working classes, subjected to increasingly intense competition and seeing no credible political alternative.

The ideological strength of fascism and neo-fascism is thus to be able to intervene on a double level: as a defence of the established social order, potentially for all those who have – or believe they have – something to defend; but, also, as the promise of a new order for those who are – or consider themselves – dispossessed or threatened with dispossession. Taking this hegemonic dimension seriously allows us to understand why historical fascism, when it came to power, managed to endure much longer than its opponents expected. The advent of fascism is not the transition from an order based on consent to an order based on violence, in other words, the birth of a power based entirely on repression, but the transition to a new mode of manufacturing consent. As such, fascism allows for the maintenance or solidification of the social order, ensuring a renewal of capitalist hegemony at a historical moment when its traditional political representatives see their social base shrinking.

In addition to an intensified use of force (though no form of power rests solely on consent), fascist hegemony implies new forms of ideological discipline and the emergence of a politico-cultural axis that is no longer that of political pluralism and the rule of law, of ‘living together’ and ‘social dialogue’, of freedom and growth. Everywhere, this new axis has the following characteristics: the safeguarding by all means of a ‘national community’ conceived in more or less explicit and narrow ethno-racial terms (according to time and country), but always turned against enemies who are to be punished because they form a ‘foreigners’ party’ (‘anti-France’, ‘un-American’, ‘antinational’, etc.). Who are these enemies? Minorities, whose mere visible presence supposedly prevents the nation from being faithful to its ‘identity’; social movements, because they aspire to dissolve all ‘natural’ hierarchies; immigration, said to jeopardise the security of ‘honest people’, occupy the jobs of ‘true nationals’ and threaten national finances; and finally, those elites that would open up the nation to all the winds of ‘globalism’.

Translated by David Fernbach

In Jackson, Mississippi, leaders are raising the alarm about a new bill in the Mississippi state-house. And you’re going to want to pay attention too.

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