As is often the case Richard Seymour perfectly captures a diffuse thought I’ve been troubled by for months, particularly with regards to what can usefully be talked about as the post-left. This is not a new tendency, consider for example Steve Hall and ultra-realist criminologists in the 2010s, but it has certainly built up a head of steam in recent years. This is what Seymour writes, with a view to the current fixation on the accusations about the BBC presenter:
This is a worrying trend, and not just for those on the wrong end of the witch-hunt, nor just because it erodes our commitment to natural justice, and endears us to gossip as gospel. This sort of politics, rather like the anti-vaxx or 5G stuff, works diagonally: it draws in educated, hitherto liberal-minded or left-wing individuals, but its natural tendency is to draw people to the right. There is a powerful cultural pull to the right which has been felt in parts of the Left, especially since the collapse of the Sanders and Corbyn projects and the disorienting impact of the plague, which manifests variously as ‘anti-woke’ politics, as anti-liberalism, as transphobia, or as conspiracism. In some notable cases, individual left-wing intellectuals have gone fully over to the Right. I fear that in our present political deadlock, the passion for justice easily devolves into the passion for persecution, manifest in giddying pulsions of excitement, indignation, hate, sadism, prurience and paranoia.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/virtual-general-85924410
This is something which Matt Bolton and Frederick Pitts suggested in their Corbynism: A Critical Approach in 2018. I thought it was a flawed book, which annoyed me at the time, but there were elements of this case which now seem prescient:
Despite differences in content, each focuses upon the use of the nation-state to protect the economic interests of the national community against a variety of ‘outsiders’. It is the logical but by no means irresistible conclusion of a particular way of grasping capitalist social relations. And while such truncated critiques of capitalism do not inevitably lead to full-on conspiracy theory or antisemitism, the risk of stumbling from one to the other is ever-present, especially when the reflexive ‘anti-imperialism’ of the two-campist worldview is added to the mix.
The risk is that by pushing the conspiratorialist narrative of a ‘rigged system,’ and proposing protectionist, nationalist solutions, the left ends up providing a set of argumentative tools that the right can easily take advantage of at a later date, and turn to its own ends. Worse, such shared critiques open up a space for potential political collaboration, however cynical, between those who purport to be political enemies.
And particularly:
The potential for a combined left-right pincer attack on ‘liberal values’ is particularly pronounced when it comes to the media and the civic culture of liberal democracies.
The extent to which the 2019 election was experienced by many, including myself, as a trauma (one followed by the unravelling of the social order in the first lockdown) has not been written about enough I feel. My sense of social hope died conclusively over that six month period, eventually reemerging as a sense of trying to bring what good I can into the slice of the universe over which I’m capable of exercising an influence. But the extent to which trauma lingers in the background here, shaping how desire is mobilised through the attention economy, would be helpful to understand.
Mark Carrigan 