I found Wendy Brown’s interview in the episode “The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy” deeply symbolic of the emptiness of much of the left and its “hard” politics.
His solution/replacement for liberal democracy is “remedial democracy,” and the idea I got from this discussion is a combination of methods and a more ecological component. That is good, but in the end, there is nothing in that about winning, or defeating, the current order, other than making room for “listening” to those lives (human and non-human) that have not been heard until now. My rough interpretation is that it is another kind of leftist politics that thinks awareness is the point of all political struggle instead of winning and changing the world.
What this means is Brown points to #StopCopCity as a true example of corrective democracy in action. What he and the narrator ignore is that the activists are losing this struggle and will lose completely when all is said and done. And in the process, the police/state made the public aware that you can be killed and your world/culture destroyed if you get in the way of the powerful interests that really rule our lives.
People like Wendy Brown, imo, are not serious political philosophers, because they refuse to really discuss what it will take to destroy an empire and destroy the growth of any new empires, if and when a hegemonic vacuum arises. The historical analogy that immediately came to mind was that of the early Christian sects (and Jewish sects) who lived on the fringes of the Roman empire and its client states, steeped in eschatological theology, awaiting the return (or coming) of the Messiah to deliver. about politics and the world as a whole. Admittedly, I’ve been doing some deep dives into that historical period, recently, so I may be biased here.
There seems to be this belief, unspoken, that neo-leftists can make a “vibe shift” by raising awareness of the injustices of the world and our eschatological moment with climate change. And Brown, to his credit, notes that neoliberalism/capitalism has replaced democratic values with market prices, but he fails to recognize that this has been done through widespread violence, coercion, surveillance and training as well as constitutional legal attacks and torture. maintenance of norms (ie Powell’s memo to Citizen’s United).
But changing vibes/raising awareness is not a real political victory or political strategy, because it willfully ignores the mass power that protects, promotes, maintains and expands the current order and its systems of mass exploitation. It is just a form of loss clothed in moral superiority and is an empty, if not hypocritical, exercise that only strengthens the hand of powerful interests that shape and destroy the world.
And I will not be ashamed to point out that we have this interview compared to real politics, and the possible winner of the BRICS.
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