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On liberal fascism

I have nothing good to say about Ronald Reagan. I do, however, have to report the troubling fact that he predicted what I am about to name: fascism arriving in the name of liberalism. Politically, I have known only the period in which capital has reasserted itself at the expense of the people. (This is an Anglocentric blog.) I have seen the destruction of livelihoods and communities. In the first phase, this evil was proud enough to speak its own name, and it claimed to assert the rights of the individual over those of the community. I know best the second phase - the death of the collectivist left and its replacement with a politics of identity that fuses the most destructive aspects of individualism and collectivism. There has been valuable, real progress in reducing discrimination in everyday life (and for many, this probably has more worth to their prospects of happiness than would economic emancipation). And there has been a triumvirate of destruction: defusion of progressive inst...
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Another Martin Niemoller riff

First they came for the shoppers, but Amazon Prime do a 30 day free trial. Then they came for the facial nudists, but I didn't mind because I found a hilarious mask on eBay. Then they came for the sunbathers, but I had a bunch of boxsets to get through on Netflix anyway. Then they came for the cultural consumers, but there's all this free stuff on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Then they came for the unvaccinated, but that's fair enough as none of us are safe till all of us are safe. Then they gave me a digital medical ID to help me prove my status, but that's fine as I have nothing to hide, so I've got nothing to fear. Then they came for the satirists, but they'd all got jobs as covid marshals, because there was nothing left to satirise. 
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Wither satire?

Satire died on 16th October 1973 when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But is a thing really dead if it can die again , and again , and again ? Now, pretty obviously, Tom Lehrer’s remark about Kissinger was in itself a satirical one. And a pretty sophisticated one at that. But satire really is dying today, and Lehrer himself (unless he was being satirical again) struck a blow in 2008: ‘just tell the people I’m voting for [soon-to-be Nobel laureate] Obama’. For satire, when it is alive, is the tool of the weak against the strong; the powerless against the powerful. The nature of the powerless is that we have our ideas – justice, freedom, humanity, solidarity – and they have their power. When the powerful adopt our terms and our arguments, we should be automatically suspicious. Sceptical, rather than cynical: occasionally, a Lumumba, an MLK, a Morales manages to flourish for a little while before the fatal blow is struck. Sometimes, the people are unified and purp...
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