<nettime> Brexit democracy

Greetings,

It is encouraging to see Wendy Brown’s name appearing in this discussion and so I will add a bit more of her insightfulness:

"the institutions as well as the political culture comprising liberal democracy are passing into history, the left is faced both with the project of mourning what it never wholly loved and with the task of dramatically resetting its critique and vision in terms of the historical supersession of liberal democracy, and not only of failed socialist experiments.” She stated this over 10 years ago; pre-fiscal crisis, pre-Trump and Brexit.

So, resetting ‘critique and vision’ are definitely called for. Unfortunately, it is misleading (or inadequate) to view the current malaise simply through the lens of national politics; the crisis we are in the midst of is truly global with dimensions that are difficult to imagine or even adequately articulate. In this context, the mud slinging in regards to Russia’s meddling in US and UK politics is but a sideshow to the recurrent - East/West - political interventions that erupted during the Cold War and continued unabated with the demise of the Soviet bloc. We hardly returned to an age of innocence and political cleanliness with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (See the late Tony Judt’s historical analysis for the machinations taking place during the post-WW II period). To reset ‘critique and vision’ it would help enormously to view issues both on an international scale and locally. To think of politics, and indeed citizenship, as multidimensiona, multicultural and transcending borders which are fluid when it comes to capital but rigid when it comes to people.

Fernand Braudel’s description of the ruthlessness that characterised late-stage capitalism is close to the mark when considering the world we now live in wherein the mask of a fraudulent sense of ‘morality’ promoted by political elites is each day shredded into smaller and smaller pieces. To paraphrase Braudel, we are living in barbaric times in which there are no rules; oligarchs, plutocrats and deep-state manipulators are continuously shuffling the deck to gain advantage, to liquidate adversaries. In this sense Trump and Brexit represent a form of desperation in which the elite of the 1% have jettisoned the norms of liberal democracy in order to encase themselves in a nostalgia for a bygone era - riddled with corruption, injustice and enumerable inequities - that we have struggled to overcome and eradicate.

cheers

allan