How do most people react when you say the word ‘politics’? If it goes anything like how it goes when I say it the reactions are probably a range of eye-rolling, angry sighs, sarcastic smiles and furrowed brows.
‘Politics’ has become such a dirty word simply for the reason that it doesn’t represent anything that the people can recognise or relate to. It doesn’t feel like anything they can even feign interest in let alone get involved with. Picture it and you imagine a couple of stuffed suits on a late night talk show, pontificating back and forth about all the symptoms of the problem without ever getting to the root of the problem itself. And thus, no solutions are reached.
We’re supposed to feel comforted by this, nevertheless, as these are ‘the adults in the room’ and they know what they’re doing, right? We’re supposed to just nod or shake our heads before whining impotently about the pay-off. Still, never mind, just go and cast your vote every few years and don’t ask too many questions about it.
It’s either that or you picture a bunch of pink or green-haired college students, usually wealthy, holding banners with barely comprehensible slogans, shouting into megaphones about stuff they aren’t old enough to understand let alone try to fix. At least, that’s how people see it. Personally, I’m not against taking to the streets in protest. Demonstrations and marches bringing attention to the issues that need it will always be necessary but if these things were effective in and of themselves we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Except, politics shouldn’t be any of those things. What is it, after all, but how we as a people coexist together in a society as free and equal as we can possibly make it? Isn’t that exactly what a society is and what it is supposed to be working towards? There’s probably nothing more worth our collective time than that.
The reason, of course, is because we are not really supposed to get involved with politics. We don’t really live in a democracy where our voices matter and our thoughts about the issues are taken into consideration — a reminder of that old Mark Twain saying, ‘If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.’ It’s fair to say then that it’s been this way for quite some time. Only now it’s worse because propaganda has become far more sophisticated and the powers that be have utilised it, wielding it ruthlessly in pursuit of political gain; they count on us not getting involved.
Academics that use deliberate jargon only serve to protect this kind of technocracy, making what they do appear to be something only those blessed with a prestige education can manage. Our institutions have been taken over by this kind of elitism, including, but definitely not limited to, all branches of government.
What’s worse is many social justice activists and left ‘intellectuals’ are also as guilty of this kind of anti-populism. Guess what, guys? Susan from down the street working two jobs just to keep a roof over her family’s head and some food in their mouths, doesn’t give two shits about Marx. She doesn’t care about you being an ‘anarcho-communist’ or whatever self-serving title makes you feel special.
Unless you take philosophy, Marxist theory, and post-structuralist analysis and make it applicable to the everyday experience, your wasting everyone’s time. It’s nothing but posturing; taking pride in being an outsider against the mainstream narrative of a sick consumer society is all good but it’s not the same as being an activist. Sorry.
There’s a certain kind of universal wisdom that these types are trained to snort at. They tell you, ‘you just don’t understand how it works’ with a self-satisfied smirk. Maybe we don’t but the thing is we don’t really need to. The same way we don’t need to understand the Dynaflow transmission of a car about to go over the edge of a cliff — because it’s redundant; we, and the car, are totally fucked.
At the root of anti-populism is the myth that it is inherently anti-intellectual — that the great unwashed are too stupid to understand what is best for society’s ills. It has, unsurprisingly, an ugly history of class and race prejudice: the people; the mob; the riff-raff; the ‘undesirables’, holding the general public in total contempt.
It should be no real shock to learn that when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated it was around the time he was trying to unite poor blacks and poor whites against their identical oppressors. A united, populist revolt is, naturally, something the powers that be revile — it is the only thing that presents a real threat to them.
Populism, when done right, appeals to the inherent similarities regardless of race, class and creed, not the differences the establishment counts on and exploits to keep the status quo unchallenged. So, unless you see wasted potential when you look at humanity rather than a mass of morons completely beyond hope or in need of moulding to your exacting standards, you’re not an activist fighting for social justice, and you certainly aren’t practicing democracy.
The simple truth of the matter is, if it’s not populist, it’s not democracy.
