I used to read "The Economist" and believe its articles but I regret ever reading that magazine now. Today, it reads more like a parody magazine, do they still believe that stuff? Like old communists with whom they have a lot in common.
A lot of neolliberal true believers I've met (though there are fewer around theee days) had previously been Trotskyists. It's not actually a very big leap.
They've done almost as much damage, too. We've been living inside an "Economist' view of the world for a while now, and their utopia turned out to be a dystopia.
I sometimes think that the technocrats/elites (however you wish to label them) have no idea how wrong they could be and how quickly it could all collapse. In that respect they perhaps could be compared to the insulated Politburos and Central Committees of Communist parties in power across Eastern Europe. They just didn't see the collapse of their system coming because they had built a self reinforcing mental and physical bubble which they lived exclusively in. Whilst all around ordinary people were starting to question everything and act on their sense of having had enough of it. Sorry for the long comment.
I forgot to add tjat another commonality between these two groups is their materialism. I have often thought that many of these former Trotskyists that have become advocates of corporate globalisation/late capitalism are fundamentally materialiats in their world view. This is perhaps why so many Marxists do indeed "sell out". If you inherently believe it's all about a struggle for resources you might just find privileged access to these far too difficult to resist. Again sorry for the long post.
I think that's true. What's also true is that both groups share an addiction to the clean, rational Big Idea. Both communism and neoliberalism are theories about how the world can be rationally ordered from the top down by clever people like them. The main difference is the mechanisms they believe in.
Your comment gave me a good smile. I was basically a member of the anarchist black bloc in my twenties. Now, in my forties, I'm a Christian housewife living rurally and homeschooling my children.
i really like this essay, though I'm not really sure it explains the Trump phenomenon which seems to be an appeal to caricatures of immigrant danger and a reaction to global inflation, though I agree that people for sure reject the clearly dishonest way Democrats suggest they care about the working class.
It's not quite clear to me what you mean exactly by left progressivism, and it seems strange to call Nike or Facebook leftist, just because they embrace a pseudo identity-politic. A nuanced account is given by Olufemi Taiwo, in his book Elite Capture. Not sure you'd like it as he is a Marxist, but it does give an account of how liberal capital markets have consumed identity politics.
I'm also quite curious why you seem to have left the Zapatista account in more recent years, as if they have gone away. To me, they are still one of the best accounts of a real community living out the principles you are drawn to. Have you rejected them for some reason?
As I said in the essay, I think that leftism and capitalism have the same root attachment to 'openness'. It explains how both embrace the mass immigration which drives populism.
I haven't written about the EZLN since I was in Mexico all those years ago, but yes, they were genuinely grassroots and built to last. I'm not at all surprised to see them still flourishing, though my politics would differ from theirs these days.
I appreciate your response at the Erasmus Q & A regarding your thoughts on the Trump administration, a question that wasn’t particularly relevant to the talk. Point is, thank you for responding with diplomacy, humor, and discretion. You could have dumped all over Trump but you didn’t. Very classy.
Yes, our root problem is not political, but spiritual. We are in the process of reaping the whirlwind for the mocking of God in most of Western culture for over half a century now. Thank you for your insight in trying to make sense of it all. Your thoughts surprisingly overlap with an essay I read earlier today. https://archive.is/X53XW
As to the recent US election, I think many of the talking heads are missing the point. Independents have not converted to being Republicans. Folks like JD, Tulsi, RFK, Jr., and Ramaswamy banded together against a kind of machine that was trying to crush them using state authority. Media lied about Biden's health and a variety of other topics. The stories tend to focus on Trump himself.
Another concern was poor people who were getting less than new (illegal) immigrants. This was noticeable to them.. and they weren't happy. There's a resentment, appropriate or not that follows from ... "we have to obey the laws or go to jail.. they don't. We get some things from our government, they get more and better things." And when they ask "why"? There is no answer.
Makes sense. Mass immigration is generally a driver of populism. It is also an article of faith both for the left and for the capitalist true believer that borders should be as open as possible.
Well, everyone gets free Emergency Department visits, regardless of ability to pay. I also work in healthcare, in the ER, actually, so I'm well aware of people, regardless of their country of origin, who use the ER for all their medical care. They don't pay their ER bills and that's why ER visits are so expensive. So while yes, immigrants use the ER for healthcare, so do plenty of other people who are on social assistance programs. What is the value of a human life? I guess we each have to answer that ourselves.
In places with sales tax, anyone purchasing within the economy is paying taxes on goods.
So, do undocumented immigrants pay state and federal taxes? In most cases, probably not. But neither do servers who don't report their tips.
Everyone working in the US pays into social security, so actually this is funded in a large part by undocumented workers who pay into SSI but don't take from it.
I won't argue that the medical system is twisted, but what is most twisted to me is that when we spend billions on the dept of defense and more billions so that Israel can go on with their genocide, I think it frankly highlights that the US doesn't give a damn about health or human life.
In London, they are currently getting the majority of the social housing. There's quite a long list. You would have to be looking the other way not to see that some of the resentments people have are based on reality.
[edit: a reader writes to tell me that the social housing figure is disputed, along with most figures in this debate. This is worth bearing in mind here. There is a lot of heat flying around. But the general trend is evident.]
I know nothing about London. I don't think anti-immigrant sentiment in the US is based on much other than xenophobia. Border towns in the US do have higher crime rates, but that is a pretty specific context that doesn't actually affect the majority of the US population. Undocumented (and legal) immigrants, do represent a good way to whip up resentment though, to be sure. Mostly, those people are working difficult labor jobs that people in the US don't want to do.
So what precisely is the reality that the resentment is based upon? That's very unclear to me.
Well, I couldn't say anything about the situation in the US. From over here though, the discourse sounds very similar to that in Europe, on both sides of the fence. One side deals, at least sometimes, in apocalyptic and often abusive language to describe immigrants. The other side denies that the sheer scale of the current migration causes any problems at all. I am hoping this logjam will be broken, but they feed off each other. All I know is that, twenty years or so ago, when inward migration was at a much lower level, none of this was occurring. In my country, what is clear is that the current rate and scale of immigration is unsustainable and has no popular mandate behind it.
In an attempt to be as specific as possible, which I think is the best way to talk about these issues, I'll cite the data. Department of Homeland Security (that's a big brother name, isn't it) had 6.5million encounters at the US-Mexico border between Feb 2021 and Oct 2023. Of those, about 2.5 million were released into the US with notices to appear in court. So the numbers are greatly exaggerated by politicians who have much to gain by stoking fear.
By contrast, in the 1940's to 1960's, the Braceros program allowed for 5 million immigrants yearly for farm work.
So whether the US can handle the numbers of undocumented immigrants seems not to be that concerning to me.
Moreover, my problem with the overall media/political narrative (again, talking about the US context) is that it does not include the fact that migration has been happening because of US policies that for decades have destabilized Central and South America through banana republics, NAFTA, and through propping up dictatorships that have been incredibly destructive. I find it incredibly cynical to point blame at people legitimately seeking a better life from problems often directly caused by US intervention.
What then, in your opinion, is the reason so many of your countryfolk seem so upset about migration? Do you believe there is no reason for concern at all? Is it all just invented or stoked u? From what I have heard from many other sources, that seems like a highly unlikely scenario. But like I say, I'm not American.
The US government has an app that people use to circumvent the usual immigration application. They enter their name and are rewarded with a flight to an airport within the US, then set up with full welfare benefits, housing, and a free phone account. It is reported, documented, and witnessed that hundreds of thousands of people have been escorted into the country with this system.
Many of us are able to see the deception of the “news” agencies and have sought out alternative sources that report the truth. Start with questioning everything you have been told.
Same thing in the US. Free money, free lodging, free phones, get out of jail free. Absolutely criminal. Accusations of racism, sexism and zenophobia are the territory of the intellectually infirm.
again, are we talking about refugees, or undocumented immigrants. I think its helpful to be specific. I am intellectually infirm, and since I'm quite ignorant, I love to know the sources behind claims since I know very little about these things.
Take your pick, with an open border, there is no real difference. This is not hidden, the Dems have been bragging about it. A few dead people, and billions in squandered taxpayer money is merely so much collateral damage.
But it’s not an open border. DHS apprehended around 5million people in the time between Feb 2021 to Oct 2023. If you look at my comments you can find sources for info about immigration numbers. If you have alternative sources that say otherwise, please share, but otherwise it’s hard to have a conversation and it’s not really helping your cause because without offering data to the contrary you seem to be parroting GOP taking points.
In the U.S. they are often set up with subsidized housing, food subsidies, and job placements which are difficult to access if you're just from a long-standing poor family that's lived in the U.S. all along.
Can you give sources for this? Refugees definitely get the assistance you mention, but Sharon F. above said specifically that "illegal immigrants are getting assistance.
During Trump's first term when he first threatened to send immigrants to Democratically-run big cities it occurred to me that if it could play this right (low hopes), the one nearest me, sorely depopulated Detroit, could really turn that to its advantage. Of course that would take considerable resources, and there are already a lot of people there struggling to find food, housing, get a decent education, job training who ought to have priority. But if a surge of new resources were directed toward native Detroiters, many of those living north of 8 Mile currently voicing (and voting) immigration resentments, along with some who aren't, would be just as upset as they are about assistance going to newly arrived Venezuelans or Haitians.
I agree. I was much affected by reading Christopher Hill's THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN in college. The ideal of the "masterless man"; all those ideas of the Diggers and the Levellers. When "Occupy Wall Street" came along I felt it again walking by a vacant lot fenced off no doubt for some future commercial development. As soon as Bloomberg sent New York's Finest to clear Zuccotti Park I knew it was over.
You are the voice of sanity in a confusing, discouraging world I see taking shape. My grandparents were born around 1900 in rural communities, were self sufficient and members of large extended families. All of that has evaporated and where the families scattered, I have no idea.
I imagine what it would be like to march into my town here in the Southern US and stage a rebellion. After a day or so we would droned into oblivion by the local SWAT team and soon forgotten. I'm sure we may get a few funny memes out of it though. The Zapatistas survived not because of their cunning or ferocity so much as the ineptitude of the Mexican govt. And their pretty much becoming what they once fought against. Give a Communist leader power and money and they'll become a Greedy Capitalist, or some amalgamation thereof. All of these problems stem from the Love of Power and Money.
I think it has more to do with what James C Scott calls "rough terrain". It's simply more costly than beneficial for the Mexican government to do anything about it. Although that is starting to change with an attempted railroad project to go through part of Chiapas.
I definitely agree that US cops would obliterate any attempts to replicate this in the US. We just don't have the same sort of rough terrain, and anyway, don't have villlages intact in the way it would require to stage a united rebellion of the sort.
Can you explain the Rod Dreher connection... I was of the impression that he moved to Hungary because he liked the autocratic regime of Orban. I'm guessing (but maybe I'm way off ) that you're not exactly a fan of the likes of Orban?
I think it's a jokey reference to the fact that he writes about some of these issues in a similar way. I have met him two or three times, but I don't know him any further than that.
Oh, good to hear. I was following you a few years back when you started writing about The Machine. And then I sort of got busy with other things there for a few years and when I recently saw you were doing some kind of thing with Dreher I thought "Oh my, has he been co-opted by the right?" But then saw your Erasmus lecture the other day and realized that you hadn't been. Cheers.
There's a dandy list of excuses growing, but I'll wager a fiver that none of the billionaire tech 'bros' pushing this electoral outcome give two hoots in hell about gender identity, EXCEPT when the birth rate falls off and the list of potential soma consumers and drone workers diminishes, and their whole entire "natural law' market 'economy' stops working at the scale they desire. It's all spectacle. I'll not be participating.
Paul your insight justifies my sense you are a Prophet for our time.
Sorta wish you had been around when I abandoned my childhood faith and ventured out as a 'seeker of the truth behind all religion and philosophy' as an eighteen year old merchant naval cadet just returned to my home county, New Zealand, after a three month voyage to the 'Far East'!
Not that, that would have enlightened either of us, at the time, because time and tide had not yet done its work on us both.
I have come to see that an Aramaic speaking prophet, and former carpenter, gave us the message that we (you and I) both rejected BUT have come to see is THE answer.
We are as vulnerable as our parents, who resided in a Garden and like Lucifer, rebelled.
A really excellent post, Paul. I will try to send it around.
I don't really know what side I'm on any more, or if there are really clear cut sides any more.
I can say that I still don't have a cell phone, a digital camera, but I drive a car, don't bicycle much, and I wouldn't advertise for my morality very much these days, even if I have pledged to go to mass every Wednesday morning.
One of my friends has a son who is living in a small town in rather southern France, but not on the Riviera, of course, and he and his woman (not married, not planning on having children either) have no car, rely on bartering for a lot of what they live on in a small village, know their neighbors, but are not farmers. They work on and off, but they are not proponents of the work ethic at all.
It looks as though the world we knew and managed to get around in has exploded now, and we are lost, still looking for it, trying to hang onto tattered remnants of it, which refuse to remain assembled in any recognizable form.
I learned about the Trump election on a day where I had no access to media (but I don't access media very much anyway) and thought that it is an event like the Brexit : it is too early to really know WHAT IT MEANS.
In the case of the Brexit, I thought even at the time that it was the death knell of the European Union... as for the Trump election, is it the death knell of the American... Union ? Hard to tell. The union has been disintegrating for awhile in the UNITED States.
I note with some pleasure the great attention you gave to France as one of the vortexes of the machine, because I definitely believe that France is one of the vortexes of the machine.
But I also believe that a lot of the hot air in general is a repeat performance of evangelic zeal in the wake of Jesus's passage on earth, which won't endear me with you, for sure.
"I don't really know what side I'm on any more, or if there are really clear cut sides any more."
Exactly.
My patriotism has always been halfhearted at best but it's hard to see any good coming from a disintegration of the American union. A lot of people would be hurt, likely me among them. Can Trump's vision of American greatness hold it together? I don't know, but even if it does we're still screwed, if in a different way.
Or maybe not. Like you say, too soon to know what all this means. Trying to stay rooted in the everyday and avoid media.
"hard to see any good coming from a disintegration of the American union. A lot of people would be hurt"
Definitely a lot of people would (will) be hurt. As someone who is sort of semi-retired at this point looking at what happened to people's pensions after the collapse of the soviet union makes me shudder. It would be a brutal life for a lot of people.
"Can Trump's vision of American greatness hold it together?" I don't see how it can. He's always been extremely divisive and I see no reason why that won't continue to be the case.
I see Trumpism as a response to a lot of the deep rot that's taken over a lot of our cultural and civic institutions (academia, government, the churches, etc), but it does nothing to fix these problems and in many ways will make them worse. And certainly we're looking at accelerated ecological degradation.
In very socialist France, I have told my husband not to retire until he absolutely has to, mainly because the retirement problem is one of the powder kegs of the machine. Deciding that people stop work at a certain point in their lives, but still need revenues, means that sooner or later, finance will come into the picture, and that means... Wall Street, and we know what Wall Street means by now, don't we ? If we don't, we should...
The irony being that we have created a world where people are saving for a rainy day a long time down the road at a time when people no longer know how to save, and have no sense of the temporality necessary to save for a rainy day much later on down the road. That's like squaring the circle, isn't it ?
Oh, I would have kept working, but there's a lot of ageism in tech and finding a tech job when you're in your 60s is nearly impossible at this point especially given the amount of layoffs that have happened in the space in the last couple of years. (that and I'm just really not sure I want to work in tech anymore seeing what they're working on - and changing careers when you're in your 60s isn't an easy thing to do).
Fortunately we've been very frugal over the years and have enough for a reasonably comfortable, though frugal retirement... if something happens to social security and/or medicare, though, that's going to be a lot less comfortable - and a lot of older Americans will be in a very dire situation.
If I were to pick one essay to tell someone “who is Paul Kingsnorth and why do you love his work so much“? This would be the essay. You are a gift to the world, brother.
I used to read "The Economist" and believe its articles but I regret ever reading that magazine now. Today, it reads more like a parody magazine, do they still believe that stuff? Like old communists with whom they have a lot in common.
A lot of neolliberal true believers I've met (though there are fewer around theee days) had previously been Trotskyists. It's not actually a very big leap.
They've done almost as much damage, too. We've been living inside an "Economist' view of the world for a while now, and their utopia turned out to be a dystopia.
I sometimes think that the technocrats/elites (however you wish to label them) have no idea how wrong they could be and how quickly it could all collapse. In that respect they perhaps could be compared to the insulated Politburos and Central Committees of Communist parties in power across Eastern Europe. They just didn't see the collapse of their system coming because they had built a self reinforcing mental and physical bubble which they lived exclusively in. Whilst all around ordinary people were starting to question everything and act on their sense of having had enough of it. Sorry for the long comment.
I forgot to add tjat another commonality between these two groups is their materialism. I have often thought that many of these former Trotskyists that have become advocates of corporate globalisation/late capitalism are fundamentally materialiats in their world view. This is perhaps why so many Marxists do indeed "sell out". If you inherently believe it's all about a struggle for resources you might just find privileged access to these far too difficult to resist. Again sorry for the long post.
I think that's true. What's also true is that both groups share an addiction to the clean, rational Big Idea. Both communism and neoliberalism are theories about how the world can be rationally ordered from the top down by clever people like them. The main difference is the mechanisms they believe in.
And yet, The Economist belongs to the Rothschilds and Agnellis, as far as I know. Not that the apparent contradiction should be a surprise these days.
You could not be more right. Today's anarchist is a quiet mom who tries to love her neighbor.
Your comment gave me a good smile. I was basically a member of the anarchist black bloc in my twenties. Now, in my forties, I'm a Christian housewife living rurally and homeschooling my children.
Ha, we would be friends, Leah.
P.S. I still owe you a penpal letter. Please forgive me.
i really like this essay, though I'm not really sure it explains the Trump phenomenon which seems to be an appeal to caricatures of immigrant danger and a reaction to global inflation, though I agree that people for sure reject the clearly dishonest way Democrats suggest they care about the working class.
It's not quite clear to me what you mean exactly by left progressivism, and it seems strange to call Nike or Facebook leftist, just because they embrace a pseudo identity-politic. A nuanced account is given by Olufemi Taiwo, in his book Elite Capture. Not sure you'd like it as he is a Marxist, but it does give an account of how liberal capital markets have consumed identity politics.
I'm also quite curious why you seem to have left the Zapatista account in more recent years, as if they have gone away. To me, they are still one of the best accounts of a real community living out the principles you are drawn to. Have you rejected them for some reason?
As I said in the essay, I think that leftism and capitalism have the same root attachment to 'openness'. It explains how both embrace the mass immigration which drives populism.
I haven't written about the EZLN since I was in Mexico all those years ago, but yes, they were genuinely grassroots and built to last. I'm not at all surprised to see them still flourishing, though my politics would differ from theirs these days.
I appreciate your response at the Erasmus Q & A regarding your thoughts on the Trump administration, a question that wasn’t particularly relevant to the talk. Point is, thank you for responding with diplomacy, humor, and discretion. You could have dumped all over Trump but you didn’t. Very classy.
I'm always classy when I'm wearing a tie ;-)
Yes, our root problem is not political, but spiritual. We are in the process of reaping the whirlwind for the mocking of God in most of Western culture for over half a century now. Thank you for your insight in trying to make sense of it all. Your thoughts surprisingly overlap with an essay I read earlier today. https://archive.is/X53XW
As to the recent US election, I think many of the talking heads are missing the point. Independents have not converted to being Republicans. Folks like JD, Tulsi, RFK, Jr., and Ramaswamy banded together against a kind of machine that was trying to crush them using state authority. Media lied about Biden's health and a variety of other topics. The stories tend to focus on Trump himself.
Another concern was poor people who were getting less than new (illegal) immigrants. This was noticeable to them.. and they weren't happy. There's a resentment, appropriate or not that follows from ... "we have to obey the laws or go to jail.. they don't. We get some things from our government, they get more and better things." And when they ask "why"? There is no answer.
Makes sense. Mass immigration is generally a driver of populism. It is also an article of faith both for the left and for the capitalist true believer that borders should be as open as possible.
I'm not sure I understand this. What are immigrants getting that "poor people" are not?
Well, everyone gets free Emergency Department visits, regardless of ability to pay. I also work in healthcare, in the ER, actually, so I'm well aware of people, regardless of their country of origin, who use the ER for all their medical care. They don't pay their ER bills and that's why ER visits are so expensive. So while yes, immigrants use the ER for healthcare, so do plenty of other people who are on social assistance programs. What is the value of a human life? I guess we each have to answer that ourselves.
In places with sales tax, anyone purchasing within the economy is paying taxes on goods.
So, do undocumented immigrants pay state and federal taxes? In most cases, probably not. But neither do servers who don't report their tips.
Everyone working in the US pays into social security, so actually this is funded in a large part by undocumented workers who pay into SSI but don't take from it.
I won't argue that the medical system is twisted, but what is most twisted to me is that when we spend billions on the dept of defense and more billions so that Israel can go on with their genocide, I think it frankly highlights that the US doesn't give a damn about health or human life.
In London, they are currently getting the majority of the social housing. There's quite a long list. You would have to be looking the other way not to see that some of the resentments people have are based on reality.
[edit: a reader writes to tell me that the social housing figure is disputed, along with most figures in this debate. This is worth bearing in mind here. There is a lot of heat flying around. But the general trend is evident.]
I know nothing about London. I don't think anti-immigrant sentiment in the US is based on much other than xenophobia. Border towns in the US do have higher crime rates, but that is a pretty specific context that doesn't actually affect the majority of the US population. Undocumented (and legal) immigrants, do represent a good way to whip up resentment though, to be sure. Mostly, those people are working difficult labor jobs that people in the US don't want to do.
So what precisely is the reality that the resentment is based upon? That's very unclear to me.
Well, I couldn't say anything about the situation in the US. From over here though, the discourse sounds very similar to that in Europe, on both sides of the fence. One side deals, at least sometimes, in apocalyptic and often abusive language to describe immigrants. The other side denies that the sheer scale of the current migration causes any problems at all. I am hoping this logjam will be broken, but they feed off each other. All I know is that, twenty years or so ago, when inward migration was at a much lower level, none of this was occurring. In my country, what is clear is that the current rate and scale of immigration is unsustainable and has no popular mandate behind it.
In an attempt to be as specific as possible, which I think is the best way to talk about these issues, I'll cite the data. Department of Homeland Security (that's a big brother name, isn't it) had 6.5million encounters at the US-Mexico border between Feb 2021 and Oct 2023. Of those, about 2.5 million were released into the US with notices to appear in court. So the numbers are greatly exaggerated by politicians who have much to gain by stoking fear.
By contrast, in the 1940's to 1960's, the Braceros program allowed for 5 million immigrants yearly for farm work.
So whether the US can handle the numbers of undocumented immigrants seems not to be that concerning to me.
Moreover, my problem with the overall media/political narrative (again, talking about the US context) is that it does not include the fact that migration has been happening because of US policies that for decades have destabilized Central and South America through banana republics, NAFTA, and through propping up dictatorships that have been incredibly destructive. I find it incredibly cynical to point blame at people legitimately seeking a better life from problems often directly caused by US intervention.
My source, by the way, is this: https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigration-figures/
What then, in your opinion, is the reason so many of your countryfolk seem so upset about migration? Do you believe there is no reason for concern at all? Is it all just invented or stoked u? From what I have heard from many other sources, that seems like a highly unlikely scenario. But like I say, I'm not American.
Thanks for this, David. Well said. I think I've seen enough of these excuses now.
Pay no attention to the thousands of refugees drop-shipped into small towns, disrupting services, taking the jobs, etc.
do you want to give a source for this claim?
https://im1776.com/springfield-investigation/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-2000-haitian-migrants-changed-rust-belt-town-of-charleroi-pennsylvania/ar-AA1s3jjN
I will say that this is certainly happening in Ireland, and it is causing growing discontent and some violent protest.
The US government has an app that people use to circumvent the usual immigration application. They enter their name and are rewarded with a flight to an airport within the US, then set up with full welfare benefits, housing, and a free phone account. It is reported, documented, and witnessed that hundreds of thousands of people have been escorted into the country with this system.
Many of us are able to see the deception of the “news” agencies and have sought out alternative sources that report the truth. Start with questioning everything you have been told.
Same thing in the US. Free money, free lodging, free phones, get out of jail free. Absolutely criminal. Accusations of racism, sexism and zenophobia are the territory of the intellectually infirm.
again, are we talking about refugees, or undocumented immigrants. I think its helpful to be specific. I am intellectually infirm, and since I'm quite ignorant, I love to know the sources behind claims since I know very little about these things.
Take your pick, with an open border, there is no real difference. This is not hidden, the Dems have been bragging about it. A few dead people, and billions in squandered taxpayer money is merely so much collateral damage.
But it’s not an open border. DHS apprehended around 5million people in the time between Feb 2021 to Oct 2023. If you look at my comments you can find sources for info about immigration numbers. If you have alternative sources that say otherwise, please share, but otherwise it’s hard to have a conversation and it’s not really helping your cause because without offering data to the contrary you seem to be parroting GOP taking points.
In the U.S. they are often set up with subsidized housing, food subsidies, and job placements which are difficult to access if you're just from a long-standing poor family that's lived in the U.S. all along.
Can you give sources for this? Refugees definitely get the assistance you mention, but Sharon F. above said specifically that "illegal immigrants are getting assistance.
During Trump's first term when he first threatened to send immigrants to Democratically-run big cities it occurred to me that if it could play this right (low hopes), the one nearest me, sorely depopulated Detroit, could really turn that to its advantage. Of course that would take considerable resources, and there are already a lot of people there struggling to find food, housing, get a decent education, job training who ought to have priority. But if a surge of new resources were directed toward native Detroiters, many of those living north of 8 Mile currently voicing (and voting) immigration resentments, along with some who aren't, would be just as upset as they are about assistance going to newly arrived Venezuelans or Haitians.
I agree. I was much affected by reading Christopher Hill's THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN in college. The ideal of the "masterless man"; all those ideas of the Diggers and the Levellers. When "Occupy Wall Street" came along I felt it again walking by a vacant lot fenced off no doubt for some future commercial development. As soon as Bloomberg sent New York's Finest to clear Zuccotti Park I knew it was over.
You are the voice of sanity in a confusing, discouraging world I see taking shape. My grandparents were born around 1900 in rural communities, were self sufficient and members of large extended families. All of that has evaporated and where the families scattered, I have no idea.
I imagine what it would be like to march into my town here in the Southern US and stage a rebellion. After a day or so we would droned into oblivion by the local SWAT team and soon forgotten. I'm sure we may get a few funny memes out of it though. The Zapatistas survived not because of their cunning or ferocity so much as the ineptitude of the Mexican govt. And their pretty much becoming what they once fought against. Give a Communist leader power and money and they'll become a Greedy Capitalist, or some amalgamation thereof. All of these problems stem from the Love of Power and Money.
I think it has more to do with what James C Scott calls "rough terrain". It's simply more costly than beneficial for the Mexican government to do anything about it. Although that is starting to change with an attempted railroad project to go through part of Chiapas.
I definitely agree that US cops would obliterate any attempts to replicate this in the US. We just don't have the same sort of rough terrain, and anyway, don't have villlages intact in the way it would require to stage a united rebellion of the sort.
Awesome read…me thinks you may have been hanging out with Rod Dreher❣️
It's the other way around ;-)
but of course 😉
my daughter and son in law were at Samford to hear your talk and so excited to be
Can you explain the Rod Dreher connection... I was of the impression that he moved to Hungary because he liked the autocratic regime of Orban. I'm guessing (but maybe I'm way off ) that you're not exactly a fan of the likes of Orban?
I think it's a jokey reference to the fact that he writes about some of these issues in a similar way. I have met him two or three times, but I don't know him any further than that.
Oh, good to hear. I was following you a few years back when you started writing about The Machine. And then I sort of got busy with other things there for a few years and when I recently saw you were doing some kind of thing with Dreher I thought "Oh my, has he been co-opted by the right?" But then saw your Erasmus lecture the other day and realized that you hadn't been. Cheers.
Nobody gets to co-opt me.
Your impression is wrong. People who read Rod know this.
Fascinating and thought provoking. Not sure how I found your work but really glad I have!
There's a dandy list of excuses growing, but I'll wager a fiver that none of the billionaire tech 'bros' pushing this electoral outcome give two hoots in hell about gender identity, EXCEPT when the birth rate falls off and the list of potential soma consumers and drone workers diminishes, and their whole entire "natural law' market 'economy' stops working at the scale they desire. It's all spectacle. I'll not be participating.
You might find this amusing (or terrifying). Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published his (Utopian) view of the AI-enhanced future "Machines of Loving Grace." https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace#basic-assumptions-and-framework. There, there, nothing to fear from the Machine. It's fueled by loving grace!
Paul your insight justifies my sense you are a Prophet for our time.
Sorta wish you had been around when I abandoned my childhood faith and ventured out as a 'seeker of the truth behind all religion and philosophy' as an eighteen year old merchant naval cadet just returned to my home county, New Zealand, after a three month voyage to the 'Far East'!
Not that, that would have enlightened either of us, at the time, because time and tide had not yet done its work on us both.
I have come to see that an Aramaic speaking prophet, and former carpenter, gave us the message that we (you and I) both rejected BUT have come to see is THE answer.
We are as vulnerable as our parents, who resided in a Garden and like Lucifer, rebelled.
Peace and All Good
Martyn-Thomas
Wallaroo
South Australia
Prophets tend to get stoned to death or beheaded, so I hope not! I'm just a writer, doing my thing.
A really excellent post, Paul. I will try to send it around.
I don't really know what side I'm on any more, or if there are really clear cut sides any more.
I can say that I still don't have a cell phone, a digital camera, but I drive a car, don't bicycle much, and I wouldn't advertise for my morality very much these days, even if I have pledged to go to mass every Wednesday morning.
One of my friends has a son who is living in a small town in rather southern France, but not on the Riviera, of course, and he and his woman (not married, not planning on having children either) have no car, rely on bartering for a lot of what they live on in a small village, know their neighbors, but are not farmers. They work on and off, but they are not proponents of the work ethic at all.
It looks as though the world we knew and managed to get around in has exploded now, and we are lost, still looking for it, trying to hang onto tattered remnants of it, which refuse to remain assembled in any recognizable form.
I learned about the Trump election on a day where I had no access to media (but I don't access media very much anyway) and thought that it is an event like the Brexit : it is too early to really know WHAT IT MEANS.
In the case of the Brexit, I thought even at the time that it was the death knell of the European Union... as for the Trump election, is it the death knell of the American... Union ? Hard to tell. The union has been disintegrating for awhile in the UNITED States.
I note with some pleasure the great attention you gave to France as one of the vortexes of the machine, because I definitely believe that France is one of the vortexes of the machine.
But I also believe that a lot of the hot air in general is a repeat performance of evangelic zeal in the wake of Jesus's passage on earth, which won't endear me with you, for sure.
But this essay is very very good. Thank you.
"I don't really know what side I'm on any more, or if there are really clear cut sides any more."
Exactly.
My patriotism has always been halfhearted at best but it's hard to see any good coming from a disintegration of the American union. A lot of people would be hurt, likely me among them. Can Trump's vision of American greatness hold it together? I don't know, but even if it does we're still screwed, if in a different way.
Or maybe not. Like you say, too soon to know what all this means. Trying to stay rooted in the everyday and avoid media.
"hard to see any good coming from a disintegration of the American union. A lot of people would be hurt"
Definitely a lot of people would (will) be hurt. As someone who is sort of semi-retired at this point looking at what happened to people's pensions after the collapse of the soviet union makes me shudder. It would be a brutal life for a lot of people.
"Can Trump's vision of American greatness hold it together?" I don't see how it can. He's always been extremely divisive and I see no reason why that won't continue to be the case.
I see Trumpism as a response to a lot of the deep rot that's taken over a lot of our cultural and civic institutions (academia, government, the churches, etc), but it does nothing to fix these problems and in many ways will make them worse. And certainly we're looking at accelerated ecological degradation.
In very socialist France, I have told my husband not to retire until he absolutely has to, mainly because the retirement problem is one of the powder kegs of the machine. Deciding that people stop work at a certain point in their lives, but still need revenues, means that sooner or later, finance will come into the picture, and that means... Wall Street, and we know what Wall Street means by now, don't we ? If we don't, we should...
The irony being that we have created a world where people are saving for a rainy day a long time down the road at a time when people no longer know how to save, and have no sense of the temporality necessary to save for a rainy day much later on down the road. That's like squaring the circle, isn't it ?
Oh, I would have kept working, but there's a lot of ageism in tech and finding a tech job when you're in your 60s is nearly impossible at this point especially given the amount of layoffs that have happened in the space in the last couple of years. (that and I'm just really not sure I want to work in tech anymore seeing what they're working on - and changing careers when you're in your 60s isn't an easy thing to do).
Fortunately we've been very frugal over the years and have enough for a reasonably comfortable, though frugal retirement... if something happens to social security and/or medicare, though, that's going to be a lot less comfortable - and a lot of older Americans will be in a very dire situation.
If I were to pick one essay to tell someone “who is Paul Kingsnorth and why do you love his work so much“? This would be the essay. You are a gift to the world, brother.