How to be a good progressive

The Canadian election campaign ended a short time ago with the return to power of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau, but only with a significantly reduced, minority government. Which will most likely depend on the parliamentary support of the considerably less successful New Democratic Party (NDP), which bills itself as being a lot more progressive than the Liberals, in order to survive for very long. During that campaign, Trudeau repeated over and over again that people should vote for him, instead of the austerity-mongering Conservative Party, because he was the only “progressive” candidate for the Prime Minister’s office who had any chance of winning that election against the Conservatives. Which, after all, is the only other party in Canadian history that has ever had a chance of forming a national government, the NDP and all the other “third” parties never having succeeded in overthrowing Canada’s binary habit, at least not at the federal level.

In Québec, one of those other “third parties”, that won even more seats than the NDP but still a lot fewer than either the Conservatives or the Liberals, was the Bloc Québécois. Under new leadership, the Bloc sprang back from near elimination the last time around (2015) to a position of once again (at least theoretically) holding the balance of power in the new federal Parliament. This time out, the Bloc has paradoxically become a much more successful electoral machine than the considerably weakened Parti Québécois, that functions only at the provincial level. The PQ was originally supposed to be controlling the Bloc, as its federal wing, back in the days when the PQ was the only (much more popular) party favouring independence. The Bloc leader, Yves-François Blanchet, used to be the environment minister in the most recent PQ government (2012-2014), and has also tried to fashion the recently reconstructed Bloc as a progressive political party.

Which makes it similar to the NDP in some ways, but with the enormous difference of also supporting Québec independence, although Blanchet has promised not to bring up the (currently less popular) sovereignty issue in the near future (at least not at the federal level). So far as progressive politics is concerned, supporting independence gives the Bloc an advantage over the NDP in one sense, since it means that the BQ can position itself as trying to free the people of Québec from Canadian imperial domination, in various different ways. Somewhat in the same fashion as Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, used Canadian nationalism, particularly economic nationalism, back in the 1970s in a half-hearted, and unsuccessful, attempt to free Canada as a whole from US imperial domination.

However, the Bloc’s position on the environment is not sufficiently free from populist influences, as in its support for the construction of a “third link” connecting vehicular traffic between Quebec City and the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. In order to qualify as a more genuinely progressive party, the BQ would have to resist the temptation to help build this kind of “pre-transition” infrastructure, which would only improve the traffic situation for a few short years, after which it would inevitably bung up again. The real solution being to spend a lot more money on vastly improving much more efficient public transit instead.

Apparently, Trudeau himself borrowed the title of “progressive”, that he had never used before the recent election campaign, from some of the people in the USA currently trying to become the Democratic Party’s candidate in next year’s presidential elections. Trudeau seems to see himself as the Canadian equivalent of the Democratic resistance to the violent, ultra-conservative, quasi-dictatorship of Donald Trump, represented in Canada by the only slightly less antediluvian Conservative Party. Which certainly begs the question of what exactly constitutes a “progressive” stance these days, since until very recently many people in Canada saw the Liberals (quite rightly) as being nothing more than “the other” Big Business party, whose ideological profile was not quite as atavistic as the Conservative one.

Trudeau’s self-imposed “progressive” monicker also seems to have become another example of continually expanding US influence on Canadian politics. Curiously enough, even though the Democrats are supposed to be engaged in an all-out battle against foreign (Russian) influence on American politics, that did not stop former Democratic president Barack Obama (not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr.) from sending out a message to Canadians, only a few days before the election, calling on them to re-elect Trudeau. Some of the people running the Democratic Party seem to think that Trudeau, like Emmanuel Macron in France and Germany’s “liberal-conservative” Angela Merkel, are all part of a world-wide, liberal-internationalist resistance movement. Pitted against the kind of ultra-right-wing, ethnic-isolationist and religious-fundamentalist populism typified not only by Donald Trump, but also by dozens of other autocratic politicians (in Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, India, Colombia, Chile, Haiti, etc.) who have taken over an ever-increasing number of countries, on every continent.

To be sure, the mainstream Democrats in the USA, and their mainstream Canadian imitators, do not seem to be very progressive at all, at least for those of us who have lived on this planet for more than a couple of decades. But it is the excessive backwardness of all those relatively new, ultra-conservative regimes, like the one Trump is running, that makes every political party in the world, considered to be even slightly to the left of them, look much more acceptable than any one of them used to be. The entire Trump machine comes off as some kind of dystopian nightmare dreamed up by someone like Hieronymus Bosch, and does indeed qualify as the most outstanding example in today’s world of an extremely dangerous political phenomenon. Namely, the capacity that that regime, and all the other ones like it, seem to possess of being able to turn the most antediluvian elements inside each popular culture into a barbarian cudgel. A cudgel that is capable of convincing millions of poor and middle-class citizens, all over the world, that their future depends on supporting openly criminal, right-wing populist strongmen rather than the more discreet leftovers from previously-dominant neoliberal internationalism, like the USA’s Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Aside from inspiration for a Bosch painting, Donald Trump himself also looks and acts like a kind of sick parody of the imaginary characters in “Gitarzan”, American country singer Ray Stevens’ hit from way back in 1969. In which a guitar-strumming Tarzan impersonator tries to set up a mock-rock band, featuring himself belting out a “tune” based on Johnny Weissmuller’s war cry, that was originally designed to imitate the attack scream of the great apes. The Tarzan character being backed up by “plain Jane, with no last name”, warbling “bay-bay” over and over again, and their pet chimp (“let’s hear it for the monkey”) creating its own guttural noises. In Trump’s version, of course, he gets to play the role of Tarzan, with Kelly-Anne Conway doing Jane and Rudy Giuliani filling in for the chimp. The rest of Trump’s comic-relief entourage doing their best to make sure that everyone else stops noticing that the whole gang of them are only in it for themselves, and could not care less about the USA, nor about its so-easily-conned population. Nor, for that matter, for any other country or people on this increasingly degenerate planet.

In order to legitimately call someone, or some political tendency, progressive, however, requires a lot more than not being quite as prehistoric as Donald Trump, nor of any of the other ultra-right-wing barbarians currently running an increasingly large number of the world’s political organizations. Some of the people projecting a progressive image, like the leader of Canada’s left-liberal NDP, Jagmeet Singh, at least at first glance do indeed seem to be significantly more progressive than mainstream politicians like Justin Trudeau. Singh’s ecological qualifications, for example, are significantly more real than those of Trudeau, whose government recently paid several billion dollars to buy a “white elephant” tar-sands pipeline with the intention of completing it, and presumably running it, some day. Nevertheless, even Singh does not oppose the occasionally job-creating fossil-fuel industry as much as he could, or should, a point that was made over and over again during the recent election campaign by Canada’s considerably less popular Green Party.

More significantly, however, is the fact that Singh is also a practising believer in the Sikh religion, which in his case means that he chooses to wear in public the various outward signs of official Sikh-ness, such as the turban, the dagger, the long beard and all the rest of it. Which is in itself a much more conservative, traditional and fundamentalist way of practising a religion than that of the more liberal, ecumenically-minded Sikhs, who realize that their religion does not require such ostentatious proof of religious orthodoxy when they are out and about among the non-Sikh people with whom they share this planet.

Singh’s approach, in an increasingly globalized and multicultural world, does not help at all to free humanity from religious fundamentalism, one of the more important characteristics of every ultra-right-wing populist movement in the world. Whether it be Christian fundamentalism (evangelical Protestantism in the USA, Orthodox Christianity in Russia or ultra-conservative Catholicism in Poland), Islamic fundamentalism (Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, its terrorist offshoot in the Islamic State movement, or Iranian Shiite orthodoxy and its own offshoots), Hindu fundamentalism in India’s ruling BJP party, Buddhist fundamentalism in ethnic-cleansing countries like Myanmar, Confucian fundamentalism in China, Shinto fundamentalism in Japan, ultra-Jewish orthodoxy in imperial Israel, or even totemist and shamanist traditionalism still dominating the thought processes of some of the world’s indigenous peoples. Not to mention the ultra-conservative wing of the “Khalistan” movement in the Punjab (Sikh-majority) region of India.

During the recent Canadian election campaign, however, Jagmeet Singh did not threaten, if elected, to possibly disallow Québec’s laicity law (“Bill 21”), like Justin Trudeau did. That law, preventing government employees in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols on the job, such as the Christian cross, the Jewish skull-cap and the Muslim hijab, should be seen as a legitimate contribution to progressive politics. In spite of a well-financed campaign in English Canada trying to depict laicity in Québec as just another example of ethnic isolationism. To be sure, Bill 21 is more of a symbol of laicity than it is a significant move against religious fundamentalism, since the Québec government still allows the Christian crucifix to be displayed in most provincial buildings, and also continues to exempt religious property from provincial taxes, as well as subsidizing religious private schools almost as much as it supports religiously-neutral public schools.

During the campaign, Singh’s way of dealing with “the Québec problem” was simply to show off his own religious garb as a kind of personal statement of counter-symbolism. However, now that Justin Trudeau has been re-elected, and apparently needs the NDP’s help to remain in power for very long, it remains to be seen what Jagmeet Singh will decide to do if ever Trudeau makes good on his threat to use the Canadian constitution against Québec’s limited-laicity law. Unfortunately, most of English Canada seems to be living in some kind of fairy-tale “Western civilization” cocoon, refusing to realize that, even though some people in the Western world support religiously-neutral laicity for reactionary, anti-Muslim reasons, the fight against religious fundamentalism is still an integral part of planetary progressivism.

Not only because religious orthodoxy always accompanies every form of right-wing populism, and ethnic isolationism, all over the world, but also because it directly threatens women’s liberation as well. Not just symbolically (as with the hijab) but also because of the hundreds of different kinds of more severely misogynist “barbarian religious practices” (such as forced marriages for under-age girls), still being supported by fundamentalists belonging to every one of the world’s religions. Which also gives the Bloc Québécois another advantage over the NDP, at least from the point of view of progressive politics.

Another major fault in most English-Canadian political opinion, at least so far as progressivism is concerned, is its eternal refusal to permit Québec’s overwhelmingly francophone majority to enjoy self-determination without outside interference. Not to the incredibly extreme extent, thank goodness, as Spain’s “anti-separatist” government, that threw some of the leaders of the Catalonian independence movement into jail for a very long time, just for daring to organize a referendum on the subject. Still, if the English-Canadian establishment really wanted to adopt the progressive mantle of “all-inclusive” politics, that they so erroneously claim to have done in the Bill 21 controversy, it would seem rather obvious that they would want to support genuine self-determination for the people of Québec. Rather than throw obstacles in their path all the time, like the sponsorship-scandal diversion that they created during the 1995 referendum campaign. Why is the possibility of Québec becoming independent some day always considered to be even more damaging to fake-progressive politics in English-speaking Canada, than does the granting of self-determination to any of Canada’s indigenous peoples? And why does the Canadian government also refuse to condemn the new Spanish Inquisition’s current attack on Catalonian self-determination?

All-out opposition to imperialism, after all, has always been considered part and parcel of progressive politics everywhere in the world. How can people outside China legitimately get upset about Chinese imperialism directed against political democracy in Hong Kong, or Chinese denial of self-determination for the Tibetan, the Uighur and the Taiwanese peoples, while simultaneously denying such rights to Québec, or to Catalonia, or to Scotland? Why not also support the reunification of the Irish people, at the expense of the imperial UK and its Northern Irish satrapy? For that matter, why get upset about Russian imperialism in the Ukraine, or in any other part of the former Soviet Union? Or even in occasionally “separatist” sections of the Russian Federation itself, such as the Chechen Republic? If would-be progressives in the Western world want to go around promoting democracy all the time, why don’t they support it all the time for real, rather than just whenever it suits them?

Come to think of it, why not get just as upset about the total lack of Canadian support for the Kurds, who may very well be the largest ethnic minority, to have always been denied statehood by almost all the world’s major empires? After having been the main force involved in putting down the ultra-barbarian Islamic State caliphate (sponsored by “Western ally” Saudi Arabia), the Kurds in Syria were abandoned, once again, by the USA and the other Western empires, to the tender mercies of the Turkish empire, the Russian empire and its own Middle Eastern satrapy, the Assad regime in Damascus.

Why has Donald Trump’s ditching of the Kurds not got very many of the world’s only theoretically “progressive” governments and political parties as furious as they ought to be? Is it because, like Trump, they cannot get themselves to support the PKK section of the Kurdish nation’s attempt to fight against both neoliberalism and neofascism by supporting US theoretician Murray Bookchin’s “communitarian socialism”? Unfortunately, Canadian politicians (and those of most other Western nations) do not seem to be all that interested in “external affairs”, at least during popular election campaigns, but that never seems to prevent them from making real foreign policy decisions all the time (sins of commission as well as sins of omission), “on behalf of the Canadian people”.

Which brings us to the other major reason why so many politicians claiming the title of “progressive” do not really deserve that title at all, namely the very strong, mutually supportive, relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism. Neoliberalism being the revival of nineteenth-century economic and social liberalism, then called laissez-faire, and neofascism being a synonym for the kind of ultra-right-wing populist authoritarianism mentioned above. Both those ideologies, originally expounded by aristocratic theoreticians like Friedrich von Hayek during the 1950s, got their first support in the real world in 1973, when the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile called on “the Chicago Boys” to concoct a socio-economic policy for them, based exclusively on the promotion of multinational “private enterprise”. Starting in 1979, Pinochet’s best friend, Margaret Thatcher of the UK, and her American sidekick, Ronald Reagan, then turned that initial partnership into a world-wide onslaught of Big Business control over everything, that even managed to include the former Soviet Union, as well as Deng Xiao-ping’s China, coming together in an orgy of gargantuan social and economic inequality, on a scale never seen before.

It was in fact the neoliberal juggernaut that created the social and economic conditions, in country after country, continent after continent, necessary to create a world-wide base for ultra-right-wing populist, neofascist, regimes like the one brought into being in the USA by Donald Trump. Which is why mainstream Democratic politicians in the USA, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and also Liberal politicians in Canada like Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Justin Trudeau, are not being at all honest when they claim to be “progressive” alternatives to barbarian monsters like Donald Trump. If the neoliberalism of almost every Western government, and dozens of neocolonial “Eastern” governments as well, had not created the conditions for the still-rising popularity of neofascist regimes all over the world, humanity would not be in the disastrous situation in which we find ourselves nowadays.

Today’s world is one in which all the major issues in international politics so far mentioned are in a state of crisis, each one of those issues negatively impacting on each of the other ones. Such as the horrendously important environmental crisis, control over which is not only being impeded by neoliberal business-as-usual, but also by extremely dangerous geopolitical confrontations between rival forms of imperialism, many of which possess nuclear weapons. As well as by world-wide imperialism’s decidedly negative effect on national self-determination, not only of minority peoples trying to become nation-states for the first time, but also on existing nation-states trying to prevent imperial neocolonialism from controlling their own destinies. Ongoing neoliberalism is also preventing any of the world’s governments from spending a much larger amount of money on social development (health, education, welfare, social housing, public transit, women’s liberation, etc.). For the simple reason that the tax base of every government, at every level, has been enormously curtailed by the world’s most important tax evaders, which is to say, the world’s most important corporate investors, not only the private ones but also the state-owned corporations copy-catting on the world’s largest individual fortunes.

In order to have the slightest chance of solving any of these horrific problems, or rather all of them coming at us all at once, we have to step back a ways and more deeply consider what is really happening here. When discussing the environmental crisis, for example, many people seem to think that “nature” is composed exclusively of all kinds of plants and animals, which are completely different from human beings. Such, however, is not the case. Most of what is natural in this universe is really an enormous amount of “empty” space, that seems to go on forever, “interrupted” from time to time by such things as energy, dark matter and a much smaller amount of visible matter (such as stars and planets), very little of which seems to be alive in any way. While it is entirely possible, given the immensity of the known universe, that there are billions of other life-forms out there somewhere, the only ones we know of at the moment are right here on Earth. At the same time, the only semi-intelligent life-forms we know of, capable of bringing into being such things as fossil fuels and nuclear weapons, without, unfortunately, being able to control them all that much, are human beings. (A category of nature which, unfortunately, includes such evolutionary throw-backs as Donald Trump.)

As for plants and animals, the way that some of those creatures treat each other much of the time really does resemble human behaviour, at least in the sense of often being unbelievably stupid and aggressive. On the one hand, it is quite “natural” for some human beings to adopt progressive ways of doing things, to a greater or a lesser extent, whenever they succeed in putting the emphasis on positive ideas, like cooperation, the common good, social development and the emergence of a much kinder, more understanding, attitude toward the other life-forms that surround us (at least for the moment) in that extremely tiny part of the universe we call the biosphere. On the other hand, however, it is also quite natural for many other human beings to have become so incredibly stupid and aggressive as to have invented the kind of reactionary behaviour underlying such concepts as neoliberalism and neofascism. So our main problem is not so much how to go about solving all the ecological, geopolitical, cultural and socio-economic problems listed above, as to how to go about controlling the antediluvian ogres among us so that they do not succeed in turning our still-lovely little planet into a lifeless landscape like the one to be found on our planet’s nearby satellite, that we have chosen to call the Moon.

The only way, therefore, to prevent William Shakespeare’s rather pessimistic description of human life on this planet as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, with Donald Trump filing in this time for Macbeth, is to enormously strengthen our common, shared progressive message against world-wide reaction. And the best way to do that is to weed out all the fake ideas creeping into that message from time to time, like the ridiculous pretension that the Muslim hijab is somehow an expression of women’s liberation, rather than in fact being quite the opposite. Or the equally ridiculous conception according to which international neoliberalism is somehow a bulwark against national-isolationist neofascism, rather than being its ideological parent instead. Bringing all the world’s progressive causes together also means doing away with merely regional ways of interpreting world politics, such as seeing everything through the kinds of deforming prisms known as Western civilization, or “making China great again”, or reviving the Islamic caliphate, or whatever other equivalent shibboleth.

Lack of unity among progressives helps ensure that reactionary forces will also remain much more powerful than progressive forces into the future. Which also means that nothing really good may emerge in this world during the next several decades because we let completely irresponsible, atavistic ways of interpreting the world dominate international politics. As I have tried to show in this blogpost, even if the conversation starts out with something as seemingly banal as the most recent Canadian election campaign, a proper understanding of what is going on requires relating all the “strictly Canadian” issues to what are really local versions of international problems. How to be a good progressive, therefore, means bringing together all the intermediate strands of the overall, world-wide message into one common discourse.

It is completely impossible to do anything real toward defeating such nauseating symptoms of political degeneracy as Donald Trump without taking on the entire antediluvian counter-revolution as a whole. We are not just up against the refusal to recognize the very existence of climate change, or nuclear war, or government austerity, or constitutional imperialism, or economic instability, or skyrocketing social inequality, or toxic masculinity, or whatever other recent manifestation of cultural entropy was recently eructed into our tiny, little section of the universe by the extremely violent forces of international reaction. But by all of them together, all the time. Doing away with one of them is also doing away with all the other ones, at the same time.