Socialdem. 21st Century

Hillary Clinton’s recent speech mentioning the Alt Right has grabbed headlines, and now it seems everyone is talking about the Alt Right. It’s bloody everywhere.The trouble with Clinton’s speech is that she seemed to identify the Alt Right with Breitbart, but Breitbart is Alt Right-lite at best, and not properly representative of the Alt Right. For example, Breitbart is pro-Israel, but the Alt Right is hostile to Israel and extremely anti-Semitic.Moreover, Milo Yiannopoulos (until recently...

Here is an updated reading list:Merquior, José Guilherme. 1986. Western Marxism. Paladin, LondonMerquior, Jose Guilherme. 1986. From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought. Verso, London.Merquior, José Guilherme. 1991. Foucault (2nd edn.). Fontana, London. Jackson, Leonard. 1991. The Poverty of Structuralism: Structuralist Theory and Literature. Longman, London. Windschuttle, Keith. 1994. The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being murdered by...

Explained in a meme:

Walter Benn Michaels discusses his book The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York, 2006).[embedded content]

Described in four easy steps in Rothbard’s own words:(1) “…the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.” (Rothbard 1998: 100).(2) “Now if a parent may own his child (within the framework of nonaggression and runaway-freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the...

Thomas Frank talks in the video below on the origins of the youth counterculture of the 1960s, and its links to, and even outgrowth from, American business and the advertising industry and the creation of a new consumer culture for teenagers and the young by business. This was, in many ways, a kind of forerunner of the modern pro-SJW corporation, obsessed with diversity and multiculturalism.[embedded content]In essence, Thomas Frank is summarising the contents of his book:Frank, Thomas C....

Serious question:[embedded content]These Democrats are calling themselves Trumpocrats (see also here).Of course, you can see the answer: Trump is calling for, broadly speaking, left-wing policies on trade and protectionism, while Clinton is in favour of toxic neoliberalism and free trade. Clinton’s politically correct SJW program is starting to put even Democrats off the party; Trump rejects this cultural leftism nonsense.Trump has also taken the GOP to the left of Clinton on some important...

I watched with fascination:[embedded content]Just listen to Nigel Farage’s speech: he attacks the big banks, multinational corporations and “modern global corporatism”; he attacks the elites. In some respects, you can easily see a left-wing politician saying the same things.What to make of this? This is clearly right-wing populism at work. But, in reality, there is a strange schizophrenia within this movement: namely, they are weak on economics, and divided into the (1) free market populists...

See this magnificent interview of Walter Benn Michaels in the socialist magazine Jacobin:Michaels, Walter Benn. 2011. “Let Them Eat Diversity. On the Politics of Identity,” Jacobin Issue 1 https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/let-them-eat-diversity/Granted there is a bit of exaggeration here and there, and some vulgar Marxism, but this article is brilliant stuff.The fundamental arguments of Walter Benn Michaels in this interview, written in 2011, are as follows:(1) there is, in reality, a...

Here is a brief reading list, which provides food for thought:Schlesinger, Arthur M. 1998. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (rev. edn.). W.W. Norton, New York.Buchanan, Patrick J. 1998. The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice are Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy. Little, Brown, Boston and London. Bawer, Bruce. 2012. The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind. Broadside Books,...