Tomorrow: Talking US Politics and Integral Futures

Join me for an impromptu Zoom call on the election, US politics, and integral theory.

Dear readers,

In a somewhat impromptu fashion, I’ve decided to host a Zoom discussion for the Mutations community on US politics, the election, and making sense of the days to come.

This past week I’ve received many requests to weigh in on current events. I had wanted to host more political discussions on Mutations after Fragments has gone to print, but perhaps it’s time. As many have been saying, liberalism is in crisis (read: imploding). More than ever, we need a time beyond progress if we are to have anything resembling a tomorrow.

This will largely be an open discussion. I’ll start us off in the first 15 minutes or so with a riff on politics and meta theory before opening it up to other shares, questions, and commentary.

Should there be enough participants, or if there’s interest in doing so, we can host breakout sessions.

The call will be tomorrow (Friday), November 15 at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET.

Register for the call here on Zoom

For now, what is there to say? There have been so many bad takes, wrong lessons (like this one) and obfuscations. Progressive populism has flickered—and let us hope we don’t have to say ‘briefly’—back into popular attention (see this statement by Bernie Sanders). David Brooks has begrudgingly conceded (“Maybe Bernie Sanders Is Right”). Krystal Ball has offered a scathing, clear-headed analysis that would threaten to belabor the Bernie point if it weren’t so important to understand:

Bernie Would Have Won

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

Union leader Jimmy Williams Jr. says that the democrats have a working class messaging problem, but losing the working class has a decades-long history (Sirota) that helps us understand what’s happening, and how we got here. Don’t take the bait, either: we shouldn’t believe for a second that the real problem has been the upswell of progressive politics. Centrist pundits have been doing damage control, signaling a further right-wing pivot for the democrats (the old ‘blame it on the left cohort’ argument). The Biden administration was supposed to be progressive-friendly, or at the very least, union friendly, but as Stephen Semler has pointed out in a recent podcast with Left Reckoning, the revoking of COVID-era social safety nets at a critical moment of rising inflation (and that weren’t supposed to go away in the first place) played a major role in the working class turning against the democrats.

I wrote my own thoughts on all this on election night:

Thinking of the greater historical trends, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? I’ve read my Benjamin. Fascism is dangerously good at speaking to the frustrations of it people: it lets them express that frustration, gives it a channel, without fundamentally changing the conditions which gave rise to it.

But, to end this article on a more constructive note—perhaps even a hopeful one—I also wrote,

If the next few years are going to be dark, then our acts will continue to burn with a disproportionate light.

The work that needs doing in these times has always been about building new progressive labor coalitions, democratizing work, resisting hawkish imperialism of all kinds, and distributing economic power.

Don't accept that any of these [progressive and transformative] aspirations are somehow 'idealistic.' They are radically pragmatic and deserve equally pragmatic and brilliant strategies.

I have no issue with owning my position on the ‘left,’ and have never found this to be a particularly polarizing perspective because what I advocate for is a transformation of worldview. This take on ‘transformational politics’ for me has come with the understanding that the future, if we are to have one at all, will need to be ‘post-capitalist.’ I believe, as Graeber famously wrote, that ours is a world that is made and remade, all the time. The theoretical and philosophical work I draw from, and am inspired by, ultimately advocates for the creation of a ‘time beyond progress’ and, subsequently, the regeneration of our material lives. There is nothing aloof about this inquiry. ‘Planetary’ and ‘ecological’ thought, living in radical relation with the more than human world; these things are, more than ever, matters of deep existential and pragmatic concern for our shared futures. I like the philosopher Bruno Latour’s name for this: he calls it ‘terrestrial’ politics.

Imagining a habitable world beyond capital and a time beyond progress--this is the 'terrestrial' politics of the future, and it is all the realism and pragmatism we so profoundly need.

This is ultimately where I conclude my forthcoming manuscript, so perhaps it’s time to start discussing these themes with the Mutations community and facilitating discussions that don’t have any qualms with holding so-called ‘progressive’ positions that focus on the transition, and regeneration, of worldviews. Let’s reclaim a sense of ‘futurism’ in this wider sense living new temporalities, and of imagining the possible.

Let’s discuss some of these themes, and more, on tomorrow’s call.