Search the archive.

In the above, Arendt is pointing out that as the notion of equality is perverted from a political ideal - a judicial or legal principle - to become a social concept meant to guide the way we actually experience an other on the level of the day to day, we lose a space for engaging an other in terms of real and valuable difference (Arendt, 1966, p 54). As this space is closed to us, we lose a means by which to encounter the other in any terms but those afforded us by liberalism's legal notions of personhood. It is for this reason, for example, that Baruch Spinoza was able to say, along with other fathers of enlightenment liberalism (including Immanuel Kant), "Pity, in a man who lives under the guidance of reason, is in itself bad and useless" (Spinoza, 2002, pp 346, 347). In their Dialectic of Enlightenment , Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno explain why pity must be rejected by rational, equal, liberal individuals such as Spinoza and Kant: "[Pity] confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p 80). Here, then, we have a clear example of a situation where a meeting with the other that might engage guilt or inequality is stifled from the beginning by the ideals of liberalism, which brook no emotion that opens up a space for negotiating the kind of difference that might force us to admit that inequities exist, inequities that cannot be subsumed under the general equality granted by the law.

As with all things psychoanalytic, we are in the precarious position of having to provide a genetic account of a non-linear process: we must start in the middle. I made the claim at the beginning of this paper that there exists a disparity between white and black Americans, and, further, that that disparity presents a problem that requires psychic reconciliation. Over the course of this paper, we have seen that where there is a failure on the part of our reparative phantasies a schizoid structure develops. I will now turn to an explication of the inevitable failure of liberalism's ideals to allow for a functional reparative process to take place in the situation with which we are concerned.

The upshot of the guilt structure I have just described is that, at the same time the omnipotence and narcissism of phantasy can cause serious damage to an other, it maintains for itself an even greater power: the power to repair that same damage. The power of the unconscious to repair in phantasy what it has destroyed in phantasy is the fundamental idea that drives Klein's concept of reparation. This reparation will be the infant's way out of the horrible fate her early dependence on her mother's breast has placed upon her (Klein, 1937, p 117). Segal writes on the value of reparation for the adult as well as the infant, "His own hatred becomes less frightening as his belief increases that his love can restore what his hatred has destroyed" (Segal, 1973, p 93).

It is my contention that the guilt structure I have just described is the foundation of Fanon's manicheanism. That is, I hold that there exists a splitting activity based in the frustration of the ideals of liberalism. This splitting separates humanity into bad-black and good-white and is always accompanied by violent, unconscious phantasy. Further, I believe that by understanding white American racism in Kleinian/Fanonian terms we find not only an explanation for its strange manichean structure but also a way out analogous to the infant's way out of the paranoid-schizoid position. In a word, by appreciating the dynamic relationship between frustration, aggression, and guilt in the unconscious, we can see the nature of the problem and the structure of its solution.

It is in and through the depressive position that we may engage a loss in such a way that we can mourn it, instead of attempting to maintain our own pure goodness in the face of genuine loss through a magical reparative process, such as the rigid one provided by the liberal ideal.

The major function of the depressive position is the restoration of split or part objects to the status of whole objects (Bion, 1967, p 80). The depressive position is so called because it engages loss and allows for the possibility of mourning that loss. The attainment of this position is only possible in and through a reparative process. So, my claim then is that reparations may function as a reparative process which allow for the unification of a previously split America. That is, in allowing white America the narcissistic phantasy of having repaired what it had destroyed, reparations may allow for a shift to the depressive position - the precondition for experiencing America not as split up into good-white and bad-black, but rather as a unified place which may maintain positive aspects at the same time it possesses bad ones. It is only in this depressive position, precisely because it can maintain good ideals along with frustrating realities, that the genuine work of overcoming is possible.

Reparation is a process that allows the subject to negotiate loss. That is, it allows the subject to regain as a whole object an object which has been split off into good parts which are maintained in the subject and bad parts which are essentially the reification on the part of the subject of the painful experience of the loss of that object. I locate liberalism's inevitable failure in its inability to allow for the possibility of loss, that is its inability to negotiate the negative. Liberalism's ideal of equality as expressible in the language of rights of man is too rigid a structure to make room for loss in any genuine sense. This is precisely because liberalism's all encompassing ideal, equality as equality of opportunity, does not leave open the possibility of identification with an object in anything but a purely positive sense. Simply put, the liberal ideal does not allow for experience of the other in any mode other than as "the same as me." An other may be free like me, they may be equal before the law like me, but may never be identified negatively as, for example, beyond me or lost to me.

A loss that the subject has no means to deal with, in this case through a reparative process, is, in a Kleinian account, projected outward. Klein terms this process of the outward projection of the painful experience of loss "projective identification." Laplanche and Pontalis define projective identification as follows, "a mechanism revealed in phantasies in which the subject inserts his self - in whole or in part - into the object..." (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p 356). That is, the process of projective identification operates unconsciously by taking some aspect or quality of the subject which is unacceptable and placing it into another object. This allows the subject to apprehend some unacceptable quality, because it is safely distanced from the subject. In a word, what cannot be experienced because it is unacceptable in oneself may be projected onto another as a way of managing that unacceptable experience. For Klein, this defense of projective identification is "the prototype of an aggressive object relation" (Klein, Quoted From Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p 356). An example of how this idea may be applied to interpret an event may be illustrative. For our event, let us imagine a student or author who, unable to cope with her inability to complete a project, angrily knocks her typewriter from the desk. Without this notion of projective identification we must assume that the student is for some reason angry with or feels threatened by the typewriter. Applying the notion of projective identification, however, we may say that the student is unable to cope with her frustration or is unable to accept her lack of creative ability. This unacceptable lack may then be projected onto the typewriter, where it can be experienced consciously and be aggressively dealt with. If then, I am correct in claiming that liberalism constitutes a rigid structure that only allows for positive identification, it should follow that the consequence of a strong attachment to liberal ideals will be the projection of a loss which it is structurally incapable of experiencing onto an other.

That might look like enacting a basic income policy with a tiered structure that corresponds to wealth status and historic disadvantage. Bhattacharya cites an idea conceived by Community Change president Dorian Warren (who’s also one of the cofounders of the Economic Security Project, which advocates for and enacts poverty-alleviating programs), called universal + basic income. The model calls for an additional payment to be given to black families on top of a standard stipend distributed to all families that qualify for the program. “The ‘plus model’ acknowledges that the wealth created in the U.S. is inextricably linked to black labor, sweat, and tears, and this community has never received the benefits created from that labor,” Bhattacharya writes. The additional payment could be determined by looking at the gap between white and black wealth and applying a proportional extra stipend to the lump sum. A similar approach could be taken to address gender wealth inequities, Bhattacharya says. Reparations are often discussed as a one-and-done project: a single payment dispersed to black families to account for the cascading disadvantages of slavery. “But there’s no silver bullet for reparations,” Bhattacharya says. “Money is important, but if every black person gets a million-dollar check, at the end of the day that’s not going to transform our economy.” Building a racial justice element into a program like a basic income would force a sustained engagement with inequality in the U.S., and allow for the way we address it to evolve over time. It’s also important, she adds, that programs like this be designed with the communities they’re designed to reach. How the money is distributed, whether it be an annual lump sum or monthly payments, should be a choice, Bhattacharya says. The idea behind a “plus model” of a basic income is to equip women and people of color with enough money to lift them out of poverty—that’s covered in the basic stipend that would go to all families struggling economically. But the additional payment on top of the basic income would enable people long disadvantaged in the economy to start building up wealth through savings and assets like homeownership. “Wealth is always the north star,” Bhattacharya says. “We have to get folks to the same space so they have wealth, so they have agency, they have choice and self-determination—that’s the exciting conversation.” But, she adds, if a program like a targeted basic income is to be successful in the U.S., the country has to dramatically reform the systems that keep people of color and women disadvantaged today. Giving single mothers additional cash resources, Bhattacharya says, won’t go too far if paid leave and supported childcare remain so lacking in the U.S. And if the criminal justice system continues incarcerating black and brown people at the rate it does today—which poses a significant barrier to wealth accumulation—the additional money to those communities will not make the intended difference. “Putting money into people’s pockets through government interventions won’t mean anything if that money is taken by the government with the other hand,” Bhattacharya says.

2) The question of who qualifies will become ever more contested and embittered.

Under today’s racial preference rules, a nephew of the King of Spain or the daughter of the chairman of the biggest bank in Chile would both qualify for Hispanic preferences if they resided in the United States. Harvard can (and does) meet its African American diversity requirements with the children of recent African immigrants, whose families never experienced slavery or segregation in this country.

Nonetheless, the basic income schemes that are currently exciting political actors are scarcely a panacea. We need to be clear about a basic income’s merits and its drawbacks. Brishen Rogers argues that economic security guarantees have to be combined with an expansion of the public sector and with rules that promote collective bargaining, increasing the relative power of labor in the wage-setting process. But while a basic income might be a big idea whose time has come, there are alternative strategies that stand a greater chance of winning over the public. And in the political struggle to create more egalitarian structures of work and welfare, it is reasonable to go further than Rogers, arguing that a basic income might actually hurt the cause. First, basic income could set back the public debate about how to create more egalitarian societies, giving succor to the forces of state retrenchment. Indeed a basic income could amplify tax resistance and increase hostility to the welfare state. As Donald Hirsch has inferred, basic income involves “a very different tax settlement to the present one.” In a climate of austerity marked by declining real wages, a basic income could well entail higher taxes on average incomes. Raising taxes is never politically popular, but to add insult to injury, these taxes would be used to fund a proposal that contradicted many citizens’ notion of what is fair, flipping the concepts of contribution and reciprocity on their head. This is even more likely in countries such as the United States and the UK where there is a higher level of diversity and less sympathy for a universal social safety net. In most western European countries, after all, voters agree that benefits and services should be directed toward those who need them most, especially children and pensioners. Moreover, work is valued as a social institution; it is widely accepted that a key function of the welfare state is to promote employment, a goal that is met very effectively in the Scandinavian countries. In other words, politically and culturally, Western societies are a long way from arriving at a “post-work” future. As long as paid work continues to be ascribed social value, those outside formal employment will be more vulnerable to isolation, poor health, and lower levels of well-being. A basic income or any measure that was perceived to promote worklessness would struggle to achieve public legitimacy. More importantly, it would risk souring the political discourse about radical measures to advance a more equal society—at a time when voters may be more amenable to it than at any point since the 1970s. Second, a basic income could increase unemployment among vulnerable constituencies, exposing them to even greater precariousness. Research by Evelyn Forget in Canada and the United States in the 1970s showed that guaranteed income schemes reduced the working hours of “secondary earners,” usually women, who were then more dependent on the principle breadwinner in the household. Feminist critics fear that basic income would lead to greater numbers of women dropping out of the labor market, or significantly reducing their working hours. Women would end up doing more unpaid domestic labor relative to men, making the household division of labor even more unequal. Third, while a basic income has seemingly radical potential, it could be insufficiently transformative. Indeed basic income would simply trap the most disadvantaged in a cycle of inequality and precariousness from which there would be little prospect of escape. For an individual with an insecure job, trapped in low-paid work, and living in poor quality urban housing, it is hard to envisage how a basic income would substantively improve life circumstances. A basic income would compensate individuals for the effects of inequality, but it would absolve governments of responsibility for taking active measures to help those most exposed to “new” and “old” social risks. Nor is a basic income a coherent answer to address the labor market inequalities that arise from technological change. The divisions that exist between high-skilled, high-wage workers doing non-routine jobs; non-automated workers employed in the low-wage services sector; and routine workers more exposed to the risk of unemployment remain intractable with or without basic income. A basic income would do little to address the unequal distribution of insecurity and precariousness. Because basic income is essentially a compensatory measure, it scarcely confronts the longstanding pathology of capitalist economies: vast inequalities in the distribution of assets, wealth, and ownership rights that are set to grow worse with the advent of new technologies. Finally, a basic income could have a detrimental impact on existing social policy. The cost of basic income would mean that credible and evidence-based reforms of the welfare state and the labor market might become unaffordable. Most benefits and subsidies already in place would have to be renegotiated. Neoliberal advocates of basic income celebrate the idea because, in the words of Charles Murray, it would be a “replacement for the welfare state.” Market liberals argue individuals could use their basic income to purchase services currently provided through the state: education, pensions, healthcare, unemployment insurance, childcare, and so on. Thus perversely (and contrary to the intentions of many of its advocates on the left), basic income might end up encouraging the marketization of the public sector, while limiting the funding available for social investment. Basic income promises to cure a vast range of social ills through a single policy intervention. In reality a variety of carefully designed social policy programs are likely to have the greatest long-term impact. Rogers is correct to highlight the positive example provided by the Nordic welfare states offering high-quality provisions such as childcare, job training, and employment activation alongside relatively generous cash benefits. Those who seek a more egalitarian distribution of welfare and work in the advanced capitalist countries need to envision a “social investment” state that emphasizes high-quality, publicly funded services accompanied by more generous income subsidies to those in greatest need. And if they are going to be tempted by radical measures, they should focus instead on those proposals that explicitly challenge the unequal concentration of capital, wealth, and power.

By tackling wealth inequality, we can ultimately put America on the road to greater racial and gender economic justice. Income is crucial for building wealth, but efforts to improve incomes alone will not close gaps in wealth along racial and gender lines. As such, we also need to consider how anti-Blackness, xenophobia, and sexism have rigged the rules of our economy to deny certain populations equal access to prosperity and liberation. This will enable us to have a more comprehensive discussion about intersectionality and the numerous issues that need to be addressed—in addition to boosting incomes—in order to create the conditions where everyone in the US truly has the ability to build wealth and thrive. This paper proposes a multi-pronged approach to designing a guaranteed income policy that includes: • Dismantling narratives that dehumanize Black and brown people and question their deservedness to receive public assistance; • Eliminating state-sponsored wealth extraction through our criminal justice system; and • Establishing a truth and reconciliation process in the US. Incorporating these elements into a no-strings-attached cash benefit for all residents can create the conditions that are necessary for true gender and racial economic justice to be achieved.

How would a basic income impact workers and firms in this context? It would surely protect workers against the economic harms of unemployment and underemployment by giving them unconditional resources, and it would enable them to bargain for higher wages and to refuse terrible jobs. But a basic income would do little to reduce corporate power, which is a function not just of wealth but of the ability of firms to structure work relationships however they wish when countervailing institutions—such as a powerful regulatory state—are absent or ineffective. Yes, a basic income would make it easier for workers to organize and demand reforms—Andy Stern dubbed it “the ultimate permanent strike fund”—but the threat of termination or retaliation would still prevent many workers from protesting or striking in the first place. And of course many have argued that a basic income would make minimum wage and collective bargaining laws less necessary, since workers’ material needs would be met by the state. But cash benefits and reasonable wages are not morally equivalent. In Robert Solow’s memorable phrase, the labor market is a “social institution” governed in part by norms of reciprocity and mutual respect. Workers often demand higher wages from larger and more profitable employers. And they work less diligently when they feel disrespected. So there is a major difference between a generous wage on the one hand and a meager wage supplemented with cash from the state on the other. Generous wages help make firms’ economic responsibility roughly commensurate with their economic power. Meager wages signal disrespect, and state transfers are impersonal. In fact, without labor market regulations in place, the impact of a basic income on very low-wage work could be disastrous. If a basic income were not extended to green card holders, guest workers, or “irregular” immigrants (those who enter or stay without authorization), such workers would be far cheaper to employ in menial jobs, at which point they would be permanently enshrined as a laboring underclass. (Currently minimum wage laws apply regardless of work authorization, on the grounds that differential treatment would undermine standards for all.) A basic income could even be designed to serve white nationalist ends. In fact, far-right European parties have often embraced the welfare state as a means of defending citizens against a purported tide of immigrants. A standalone basic income also will not ensure equal access to quality education, health care, mental health care, housing, and transportation. Liberal markets systematically fail to provide such goods to the poor and working class, for the simple reason that they often are not profitable when provided on equitable terms. Giving cash to individuals to purchase them will not suddenly change matters. Popular debates have largely ignored these limits of a standalone basic income, an oversight that is not entirely accidental. As a tax-and-transfer program, basic income would be consistent with a wide variety of political-economic systems, including neoliberal capitalism, social democracy, and various forms of socialism, but much of the basic income literature has a libertarian streak. On the right, Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax in large part because he hoped it would reduce government bureaucracy. On the left, Philippe van Parijs’s now-classic argument for the policy held it would maximize what he called “real freedom” better than standard welfare-state policies. And Silicon Valley’s take exemplifies an “everyday libertarianism,” which views market results, including pre-tax incomes, as presumptively fair. Unlike many libertarians, basic income proponents accept the necessity and fairness of income and wealth taxation. But a basic income is still no cure for the moral ills of liberal markets. Since labor cannot be separated from workers, it will never be a classic commodity, and labor markets will never be stock exchanges for faceless buyers and sellers. Low wages carry a stigma that low bids for soybeans never will. In the long run, companies cannot treat workers or even consumers as line items on a balance sheet without risking a revolt. Uber is now paying a high price for ignoring this lesson. The company’s flagrant disregard for our moral economy and its open embrace of a cutthroat, winner-take-all libertarianism made it a pariah in many quarters well before it faced allegations of a workplace culture of sexual harassment.

The United States government launched its reparations program to African Americans in autumn of 1969. Originally known as “the Philadelphia plan,” the program set quotas for black employment in construction trades. Over the next decades, such quotas would spread from industry to industry, and would expand into higher education and public contracting.

The plan is usually credited to the Nixon administration. Sometimes it’s even described as a secret scheme to split the Democratic base. The history is more prosaic. The plan originated under the Johnson administration, following President Lyndon Johnson’s pledge in his 1965 Howard University speech to seek racial equality as a result, not merely as a theory.

Given this, it would seem like the solution to Othering would be, as David Hume suggests, to focus on what we have in common rather than what sets us apart. But this isn’t a perfect solution either, because the process of distinguishing who we are from who we’re not is part of the way we develop our identity.

By focusing only on what is similar between us and other people, we lose an important tool in discovering our personal identity. Oftentimes it’s our differences that make us unique.

As we become preoccupied with the busy, everydayness of our lives, we can often take the people around us for granted. In some cases, this mean we fail to be polite to them, or be grateful for the things they do to help us. In more extreme cases, we can objectify or commodify the people around us – treating them as though they were just tools for our own purposes, rather than people with rights and goals of their own. This runs against the moral imperative advocated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant to never treat people as a mere means to our own ends.

A common solution to this moral problem is to try to remind people of our ‘shared humanity’. We are advised to show empathy, imagine how other people might experience our words and actions and put ourselves in other people’s shoes. These strategies all boil down to one basic belief: if we can just realise how similar we are to the people around us, we’ll stop treating them poorly. For example, the Scottish philosopher David Hume believed sympathy was the foundation of ethics.

In China people can have their social credit score docked for posting fake news online. We may, of course, ask, fake according to whom? After all, the Chinese government maintains that the Tienanmen Square Massacre of 1989 was “fake news” drummed up by the West to undermine the regime. Closer to home, the mainstream media was entirely complicit in selling the war on Iraq to the public, but I very much doubt we will see people being sanctioned for posting news from mainstream sources such as the BBC or MSNBC. Our leaders are above falsifying our historic records and sending embarrassing incidents down the memory hole for permanent deletion. The purse strings of the universal basic income also present a grave threat to freedom of speech. Anyone who has been following the “woke wars” on Twitter and other social media platforms will have heard of people receiving lifetime bans for tweeting things like “Men are never women.” Now whether you believe such a message is transphobic or otherwise, you may at least believe that someone has the right to tweet it, and be duly educated as to the wrongs of their action by other users. The universal basic income could easily become the new weapon to wield against those who hold unpopular opinions or those that are simply no longer politically correct. It will be first used to strike against unpopular groups such as racists, misogynists, homophobes, and bigots. Not many people will come to their defense when they lose their basic income for spreading hate. But one day you yourself may hold an unpopular opinion that is relatively benign. Maybe you will say that people shouldn’t have their basic income docked just because they say unpopular things on the internet. You will not just be slapped with a Twitter ban, you will potentially lose $1000 a month.

What does Bataille mean by sovereignty? How can an ultra-leftist be so passionate about a notion that is so closely associated with the power of monarchy? Bataille’s concern is not the sovereignty of nation states enshrined in international law; nor is it monarchic sovereignty: it is not the sovereign but the experience of sovereignty that fascinates him. Bataille hoped for a new sense of universal sovereignty which would reveal priestly and monarchic forms to be ‘an enormous failure . . . we can only go further, without imagining for a moment the possibility of going back’ (1991, p. 228). Nevertheless, Bataille’s position depends on a reading of monarchic power and sacred kingship, particularly in the feudal era, that departs sharply from Marxist and communist modes of understanding sovereignty and of power more generally. Sacred kingship should not be confused with the ‘divine right’ of the kings of European states; instead it refers to the tragic status of kings who are expected and required to die or be sacrificed on behalf of their people (see Girard, 1977; De Heusch, 1985; Bataille, 1986). Bataille’s arguments on the nature of sovereignty remain inimical to the liberal left and continue to be presented as ‘evidence’ of the failure of his political positions (Habermas, 1987, pp. 211–223; Nancy, 1991, pp. 16–42; Agamben, 1998, pp. 61–62, 112–114; Arppe, 2009).

It is not difficult to present what Bataille means by sovereignty in general outline. It is that which is opposed to servility, utility and subordination: ‘Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty’ (Bataille, 1991, p. 198). Bataille even presents an extensive list of things sovereign:

Foucault marks the important shift from classical biopower to modern biopolitics. Classical biopower is summed up as the sovereign decision ‘‘to take life or let live,’’ whereas modern biopolitics is conceived as ‘‘the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.’’8 The decision to kill or let live is replaced with a productive biopolitics that is twofold, that ‘‘makes live’’ and ‘‘lets die.’’ Death becomes a consequence*a necessary part*of living. Such death is too easily elided and dismissed. Nobody is killed, at least not directly, and nobody’s hands are bloodied, at least not that we can see; the crimes are outsourced to penal colonies, through ‘‘extraordinary rendition’’ become ordinary, obfuscated by State bureaucracy, and covered up by one media spectacle after another. These deaths are never ‘‘caused’’ as such; officially, they are merely ‘‘allowed,’’ a passive event, collateral damage. But biopolitical logic requires them. In order that ‘‘we’’ may live, live well and live fully, ‘‘they’’ must die, the distinction between the virtuous citizen and the other excluded as bare life, disposable life. Here we might think of the neomort kept ‘‘alive’’ for organ harvesting, the deaths resulting from pharmaceutical testing in poorer parts of the globe, or the repatriated corpses of US soldiers forbidden from entering ‘‘public speech’’ through a media moratorium. In the space that remains, I will take up the question of death in order to protest the biopolitical logic that continues to define its terms. I believe that Agamben’s conception of biopolitics is not radical enough because it is informed by the logic of the exception*essentially a juridical logic derived from Schmitt. Agamben states that the exception is an inclusive-exclusion or an exclusive-inclusion,9 both included and excluded from the juridical.10 Here the juridical appears to be more originary and encompassing than the political. This follows from what some might call a problematic reading of Aristotle on Agamben’s part, and so I will return to Aristotle to suggest how both the living and the dead fall within the sphere of the political, marking a ‘‘threshold’’ (one of Agamben’s frequently used terms) that is perhaps not just within the sovereign’s power to bridge juridically. In other words, Aristotle’s more radical conception of the political allows us to see how death exceeds, in some sense, the juridical logic of the exception. Following recent work,11 we might look toward what I would call the productive bafflement of death as a way to interrupt, to momentarily suspend, or to meaningfully subvert biopolitical logic through thanatopolitics.

--turns farm bill because if the states become fascist then they wont give

--changes the senators which means they strike down bills by the time we vote on bills, or puts fascist pressure on them

Anyone who’s taken a class on US history knows the framers feared the concentration of power. They believed Lord Acton’s aphorism, that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So the United States Constitution separates powers three ways at the federal level (legislative, executive and judicial branches) and another way with each state added to the union. This is called federalism. Federalism as it has been practiced in the US has never been what we were taught. It does not prevent tyranny. It creates it. It does not create freedom. It prevents it. Federalism is not a device for the political minority to check and balance rule by the political majority. Another thing you know from your history class – federalism prevents tyranny and hence creates freedom. The thinking was that with the federal government constitutionally restrained, states and localities were free to create governments and public spaces as they saw fit. But federalism as it has been practiced in the US has never been what we were taught. It does not prevent tyranny. It creates it. It does not create freedom. It prevents it. Federalism is not a device for the political minority to check and balance rule by the political majority. On the contrary, as William H. Riker once wrote, “it is impossible to interpret federalism as other than a device for minority tyranny.” In his classic 1964 study, Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance, he said: If one approves of the goals and values of the privileged minority, one should approve of federalism. Thus, if in the United States one approves of Southern white racists, then one should approve of American federalism. If, on the other hand, one disapproves of the values of the privileged minority, one should disapprove of federalism. Thus, if in the United States one disapproves of racism, one should disapprove of federalism. Riker said he doesn’t think we need to take “very seriously” the traditional argument in favor of federalism. It’s “at best folk wisdom.” But Lisa Corrigan thinks it’s more. A professor of communication and Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Arkansas, she said “conflict between the federal government and the states is the central problem of the United States.” Indeed, she said during an interview, the Republican Party exploits federalism to encumber or even dismantle democracy, together making them the principal source of fascism, American-style. Why do you say the GOP is fascist? Because they are manufacturing a political ecosystem in which there’s no need for debate, the popular will, or free and fair elections. They are framing democracy itself as a threat to the people and undermining voting rights and public participation in the formal political process. These are all hallmark signs of fascism. Fascism is a structure that withholds public goods and services or that steers them into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. Supporting public goods and expanding public welfare is what creates the support for elected officials who want to defend and expand democracy. They say they are “conserving,” but that’s a framework for the distribution of resources from the bottom to the top through regressive tax policy that doesn’t deliver public goods to the people. Are you suggesting that when conservatives said government is the problem, not the solution, that that’s a kind of fascism. Yes. The rhetorical source for contemporary fascism is the Barry Goldwater-Ronald Reagan line of argument in which the government is the source of the nation’s problems. But without centralized power, there is no equal distribution of resources or civil rights. To undermine federal power is to push authority to the states, which is where the incoherence of policy becomes grievance (Trumpism). The country hasn’t had an orientation toward abundance or shared resources in your lifetime. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The answer can be found in expanding social goods. Reagan demonized social welfare. But I went to public schools and happily used my public library. I utilize highways. I can access emergency rooms. I live in a state that benefits from huge agricultural subsidies. “Fascism is a structure that withholds public goods and services or that steers them into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. Supporting public goods and connecting with people to expand public welfare is what creates the support for elected officials who want to defend and expand democracy.” We all benefit from social welfare and expanding the social goods subsidized by our tax dollars. It creates an incentive to participate in democracy. When we pay taxes and benefit from them, we are more invested in the democratic process. As privatization of public services expands, people have less incentive to participate in the public. When people are not collaborating to manage public goods and services, they wield power against one another. Scarcity creates resource wars over everything from food to electricity to education. You mention how decentralized power prevents the equal distribution of resources and creates conditions for scarcity. Does that mean federalism as practiced in the US is conducive to fascism? I do mean this. My rights in this country are indexed by my zip code. I can drive an hour north or west and have a totally different set of rights and different access to resources. This is further complicated by redlining and segregation, which index geographical rights on race. This is why you are seeing state legislatures like Texas’ returning to vigilantism and writing versions of the Fugitive Slave Laws into their legislation with respect to reproductive health care and abortion. Our political moment is the culmination of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. The animation of racism combined with austerity is predictable and destructive. Watching southern states withhold covid relief or take credit for and benefit from federal infrastructure funding that they said they opposed is a symptom of that culmination. There are no minority rights when the minority rules. Restrictions on voting rights and erosion of freedom of speech are essential to state rule. Nixon’s “silent majority” was really a silent minority. The political minority is where the authoritarian impulses find expression. If a major party bucks all of the politically popular issues of the day and pushes ahead towards disenfranchisement, they are the new fascism. Let’s bring the Supreme Court into this. Three justices are beneficiaries of a president who colluded with a foreign enemy to sabotage a rival to “win” the election. Now that court is prepared to reverse rights interpreted through the 14th Amendment. Thoughts? The goal is to return the country to pre-Brown days (1954) prior to the civil rights movement, desegregation, the women’s movement, the advent of birth control, the birth of the modern labor movement and the student movement. This is the southern strategy in a nutshell. I think the Supreme Court poses a problem for the Democrats and they know it. They ignored the judiciary as a branch of government, despite the clarion call of the Reagan Administration to move the judiciary and SCOTUS to the right and they had no counter. SCOTUS will be a huge conversation after the midterms, I suspect. “They say they are ‘conserving,’ but that’s a framework for the distribution of resources from the bottom to the top through regressive tax policy that doesn’t deliver public goods to the people.” I also think people need to understand that investigations of sitting members of all three branches of government will also draw massive blowback when the GOP regains power in its current form. They will weaponize investigative power against members of the Democratic Party just for being members, not necessarily for malfeasance. The Democrats should expect it. But the public should understand that fascists weaponize investigative power to imprison enemies. Not for malfeasance but to control the landscape. That will be the pivot for a resurgent GOP controlling all three branches of government.

Bataille’s publications on politics ridicule ethical and moral thinking as the props and alibis of liberal capitalist exploitation, stating that all thought that does not immediately challenge capitalism has a ‘demeanour of senile trickery and comical smugness’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 32). Mainstream political debate and ethical discussion is ruled by such trickery and smugness to this day. There has been absolutely no rejuvenation of political thought since Bataille’s day, indeed if the dominant liberal traditions were senile in Bataille’s age, they are zombified today, preserved in a media void, neither dead nor alive and leaving the majority utterly indifferent. Yet, Bataille’s position was an optimistic one: the ‘uprising of the lower classes’ promised a new society beyond bourgeois liberal capitalism. The agitation of the lower classes is analogous to the left pole of the sacred: they must bring down the elevated and powerful in order to rejuvenate the whole. Bataille finds in Nietzsche powerful support for his growing dis- trust of political organisation and action. For Bataille, politics (in the accepted or restricted sense) is always tied to temporality, to objects Politics and community 61 62 Politics and community and goals: it reflects on the past, finds it deficient and seeks improve- ments for the future. This is what enslaves [subordinates] politics to time or duration, just as it enslaves [subordinates] human beings to a condition of working for and anticipating ends and goals, and the elusive search for happiness. The present moment is denied or suppressed. Being is thus fragmented by role, career, position, place, time. For Bataille, the present – an eternal moment of infinite freedom, must not be denied. Given this constitutive fragmentation, politics, in the conventional sense, can only fail. It must fail because, in a sense, it is designed to fail, just as ethics always fails – neither really help the lowly or excluded. They fail because their purpose is to defuse the incendiary nature of being, to deny the scream of life, to prescribe a slow, torturous neutralisation of life mortgaged against the future. The future always belongs to those with power; it is the now which must be seized. Bataille’s ‘politics’ is a politics of community, of an ‘impossible’ community. Though Bataille rejects parliamentary democracy and its political systems, parties and organisations as barriers to freedom, along with all utopian attempts to reform or ameliorate the existing system, it does not follow that his thought is apolitical as some have charged. Bataille’s revolutionary thinking on the political envisages a different world, a fundamentally altered society, and an altered or ‘other’ commu- nism (Bataille, in Mitchell & Winfree, 2009, p. 205). Far from giving up on these hopes, Bataille turned to mysticism and to eroticism to deepen this search for revolutionary transformation. Mysticism and eroticism do indeed open new worlds, worlds radically other than that of productive, servile labour and the demands of capitalist accumulation.

Conservationists are desperate for a biodiversity accord that will carry the same weight as the Paris climate agreement. But so far, this subject has received miserably little attention even though many scientists say it poses at least an equal threat to humanity.

The last two major biodiversity agreements – in 2002 and 2010 – have failed to stem the worst loss of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.

New research shows that the loss of biodiversity can increase the risk of "extinction cascades," where an initial species loss leads to a domino effect of further extinctions.

The researchers, from the University of Exeter, showed there is a higher risk of extinction cascades when other species are not present to fill the "gap" created by the loss of a species.