🇬🇧The political repression against protestors in London yesterday is interesting because it shows us that currently:
🚷normality must be enforced by violence.🚷
A strong confident society doesn't need to lock people up when they say they don't agree with some public event; it just ignores them.
Silence is the most utterly destructive way to handle opposition.
So what I'm left with is an impression of:
🚓the vicious fragility of British public life.🚓
I don't expect an authoritarian government to behave in any other way - what I think is remarkable is how well this all shows that authoritarianism is a weak form of rule.
Millions of words were written in the 1950-80s about how western societies' governing elites avoided social change through various 'soft' measures and through tolerating and recuperating opposition.
A government that only responds with prison cells is a government that has given up on these forms of soft power.
There's a lot of different flavours of authoritarianism around these days.
They're all bad, of course, but understanding how they are different helps us understand what makes them work and hence helps us defeat them.
For example, the Russian regime has turned to popular nationalist mobilisation of a fascist kind very reluctantly. Fascists see themselves as revolutionaries, Putin just wants to live in nostalgia. So he's weak in a way you'd expect a 'proper' fascist to be strong,
There's a similarity to the authoritarianism we're seeing in the UK right now.
There's no fascist attempt to talk about radical renewal or mass mobilisations; just a desire to stop the clock and live in a picture on the front of a chocolate box.
The Franco regime in Spain is a great lens to look at authoritarianism because it was made up of three strands of it:
Radical religious conservatism
Military authoritarianism
And fascism 'proper'
The religious wanted a theocracy, the military wanted a royalist bureaucracy and the fascists wanted a national unity based on a cross-class organisation of workers and public services.
None of the got what they wanted and Franco played them off against each other.
So to apply this lens to British authoritarianism I think we have a similar mix.
Radical nationalists who wanted Brexit to be some kind of unifying national renewal that brought everyone together.
Conservatives who want to above all enforce certain social norms around sexuality and gender.
Authoritarian professional politicians with no real beliefs but who are looking for any opportunity to hold onto power.
What can we say about the balance of power between these forces?
Those who believe in free markets have had to see trade and the economy suffer as politics is prioritised instead.
Those who wanted national renewal have seen little spending on 'levelling up' or benefits of leaving behind EU rules.
I'd say this means the professional cynical politicians are in the driving seat, giving the others crumbs and cosying up to the cultural conservatives - because culture war is cheap.
I guess my conclusion here is that the good news is the British government isn't as dangerous as an actual fascist movement would be.
That what they represent is just two technocrats and one transphobe in a trenchcoat.
And that's why they are so weak they need to resort to heavy repression.
(And my implication is also that the political space is open for organising opposition.
This is why I care about social media so much, because I see it as one of the places where these kinds of counters to authoritarianism can grow)
To continue this point - look at how the Labour leadership is responding to the arrests.
My understanding based on what Streeting is saying is that he's extremely uncomfortable opposing the police and doesn't at all want to be seen as aligned with protestors, yet he's getting shoved into saying something vaguely critical because of how blatant it was.
Likewise the BBC is all but forced to cover it because they know they'll be ridiculous if they ignore it. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-65515769
"Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor”, as the pirate said to Alexander the Great
@Loukas As a libertarian and a republican living in the UK, I dream one day of living in the Federal Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I'll be able to say I live in *FU*, and I'll be able to vote for a president.
Parliament will be renamed to Congress.
The house of lords will be renamed to the Senate.
We will also have Proportional Representation, rather than our broken First Past The Past electoral system; people like me could join parties that match our ideals much more closely.
T1Danna
Loukas (They/Them) 🏳️⚧️
Bodil
Simon dē Gulielmō 🐧
Lou
Leah Rowe ist kein Roweboter