[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the sorry state of traditional political parties, the swing to the right and politicians ignoring HR or taking them lightly. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages. Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
Once upon a time, there were parties
1. They were active associations that developed with the achievement of universal suffrage, which had brought millions of people into active citizenship. They had powerful territorial branches, youth and side organizations. Every two or three years they would gather the representatives of the members in congresses where currents clashed, opposing motions were presented and votes were taken on programs and leaders. Whereas in earlier times, in Italy for example, some 9 per cent of the population over the age of 16 was registered in parties, today it would only be just over 1 per cent. Voters are also decreasing (while the population has increased). The recruiting of party membership is often for reasons of power management rather than for idealistic reasons –wither human rights (HR)…
2. The structure of parties has become that of oligarchies; now the few close collaborators of the ‘leader’ call the shots. No wonder few in the population trust parties. Special interest people and groups give liberal donations to parties of the status-quo. Programs and platforms do not originate from internal debates, but are commissioned from consultants and the parties’ websites say very little, making them look like models of the much-reviled bureaucracy.
3. All these data show that a real agony of the parties is underway. They have become ‘fragile, volatile, insubstantial’. Active politics, which was the commitment of many, has now become the thing of the few. They are called political forces, but they are neither forces nor do they represent clear-cut policies. I ask: How can the state be democratic if the parties, that are still the main instrument for democratizing the state, are not?* (Sabino Cassese, Corriere della Sera) –wither HR…
*: On second thought: I am still trying to understand whether and how digital democracy can serve to make parties more democratic.
Yes, politics is stressful
4. The objective of practicing it should be to keep the stress from turning into cardiac arrest. In this respect, politics is a more desperate and tragic pursuit than the pursuit of utopian ideals.** The first cheer for politics is surely for getting people to act in unison***; the second is for getting them to stop and prevent the cardiac arrest. (Adam Gopnik)
**: It seems that political utopias have definitively ended (are HR one of them?); they are being replaced by dystopias —and by (false?) scientific and technological utopias (Albino Gomez).
***: Would politics be better if everyone shared my politics? The greatest service of politics is not to enable the mobilization of people who only have my same views; it is to enable people to live together when their views differ. (A. Gopnik) ..a HR pursuit.
5. Two caveats here:
- Even in the best of cases, the process leading to the use of knowledge for decision-making is so complex that science and research still barely get taken into account in practice and in political decision-making levels. (Universite de Montreal) and
- ‘Politically correct’ activists under the wing of (funded by) corporations through their myriad cultural and university tentacles, continue to walk their important decision-making meetings and, ultimately, fall in line with the status-quo. (Oleg Yasinsky)
Politically incorrect
-Where political and/or religious orthodoxy is imposed, you have the seed of totalitarianism. (James Banner)
6. There are great differences between variants and sub-variants of the extreme Right such as neo-Nazis, supremacists, ultra-nationalists, traditionalists… Today, their main center of recruitment takes place in social networks, especially in closed Twitter groups or in those platforms that do not accept any kind of regulation and that, on the contrary, encourage hate speech through a false freedom of expression without limits or sanctions. This points to a decadent future that rejects any kind of democracy, because of what these users consider the ‘advantages’ and ‘opportunities’ democracy provides to the sectors they most reject: the poor, foreigners, Jews, women, indigenous and trans people, etc (all intimately HR-linked issues). Everything that smells of progressiveness is considered a perverse inheritance of ‘cultural Marxism’. For them there is only recourse to violence and direct action. (Daniel Kersffeld)
7. The ideology of the different variants is the same though, but do keep in mind there is not just one extreme Right, but several groups spread across different geographies and societies so they have different objectives and use very different methods of action.
8. For sectors of the extreme Right, ‘communism’ serves as a convenient weapon to unsubstantiatedly demonize political opponents, to justify vilifying those opponents on social media and to promote hate speech. It is too early for a general assessment of the times we are living through, but the signs are disturbing and do not bode well. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
9. Aha! One also readily finds visceral accusations that see the far-Left and the far-Right as equally bad. (??) But they are not. It is a false equivalency. Some, like myself, see the far-Right as severely worse than the Left. The far-Right is worse than the far-Left, because it holds bureaucracy hostage to the whims of archaic puritanical values; because it unwaveringly bails out those rendered rich –and that is much more dangerous since it abjectly neglects the majority opinion on nearly all legislative matters. The far-Left’s damage to culture, to HR and to politics pales in comparison to the aforementioned. The far-Left and far-Right are not equally bad. (Daniel Lehewych) You decide what you think…
10. And a final point here related to totalitarianisms: Why do human beings allow themselves to be dominated and live a submissive existence subjected to the power of other human beings? (Henri Laborit) Is this a case of voluntary servitude? Are submission, conscious servility and mere habit a matter of moral cowardice?**** (Étienne de la Boétie already in the mid-1500s)
****: And seen from the other side of the coin: The dominant social strata see, with fear, that the dominated can rebel and not accept domination. We live in a scheme of domination that sickens not only the subjugated population, but also the dominant caste. Conservative politicians and businessmen, beneficiaries of constitutions and laws that they themselves passed see, with horror, the end of a regime that guarantees their survival and political, economic, financial and cultural domination over the mass of the dominated. (Louis Casado) A quote here is fitting: “Traveler, go and tell Sparta that here we lie for having obeyed its laws”. (Simonide of Ceos, words inscribed on the summit of Mount Kolonos in homage to Leonidas).
11. Many constitutions, written by the elites, have the consequence that, whoever is in government, will force the majorities to do what the elites want. The rules, then, are maintained in function of the strict preservation of the interests of ‘those who must win’ at all cost and in any way necessary.*****
*****: Let us not forget: Equality of opportunity is what the lottery promises: everyone can win. In reality only one always wins. And when you cheat in the lottery… (Louis Casado)
And what about the often politically corrupt?
-For Nietzsche, appearance, pretending and deception are deeper than the will for the truth –reminds you of some politicians?
–Politics is a lot more personal than we like to admit. (Daniel Lehewych)
12. Politicians by themselves can neither embrace nor face all the challenges that the world presents today. True. But it is high time politicians proactively interact with public interest civil society and the intellectual community. (Federico Mayor Zaragoza). …Not just making people believe that they are free. Never forget: Tony Blair used to say: “The memory of the public opinion lasts no more than eight days“.
13. Petty politics, storms in a glass of water, smokescreens, are all resources that have come to the fore to divert attention from the underlying problems and the big HR issues at stake. But what we see is that certain politicians are not addressing the issues with more frankness and with fewer (ever-present) conflicts of interest. This is not different from the practice of generations of politicians that intertwined politics and money. The truth is that if we are talking about moral superiority, it would be better for them to shut up (or for us to make them shut up!).
14. A new generation of politicians has arrived with positions that the old politics is fighting so as not to lose their grip on power. The freshness or candor of these new politicians is nothing more than a way of doing politics in a more transparent way, with less lying and in a way capable of breaking the taboos of the so-called ‘politically correct’ even if this means stepping on the toes of some politicians and businessmen who believe they are untouchable. (Primera Piedra) …a ray of hope here?
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-The left-wing parties, with few exceptions, have given up their own (left-wing) position on the war in Ukraine. Some of those parties who had distinguished themselves in the past with their stance against NATO expansion have remained silent in the face of its senseless and dangerous expansion. (B. de Sousa Santos)