Kel Varnsen I'm talking about a conversation we had about the economic impacts of migration several years ago. The posts are no doubt buried here, I made a quick attempt to hunt them down but the new forum platform doesn't have adequate full text search.
Gurgen Your strategy is shouting racist, like the left tends to do. The effective strategy is substantive debate
I'm not shouting. I'm a simple soul. I call the summer sky blue, and I call a politician whose career has relied on propagating the "great replacement theory" of the French New Right a racist fascist. It's what words are for.
It is a lie when someone explains the pernicious social and economic impacts of "neoliberalism" in terms of migration or cultural difference.
Aboutaleb characterises the slipperiness in the interview you linked above:
… we certainly have a migration problem in Rotterdam when it comes to the relationship between people and social housing: can we house all those people?!
It's a canny encapsulation of how migration is a cross-cutting factor that manifests in many social and economic situations without being decisive. It is a matter of convenient interpretation to ignore inadequate public spending on social housing and instead blame migration for homelessness. This kind of fake pragmatism always depends on the naturalisation of artificial limits, which usually amount to variations on the rich man's motto: "the poor will always be with us".
Problems that currently vary across many "developed economies": sky high rents, soaring inflation and cost of living, housing shortages, record inequality, and a life-threatening spike in poverty conditions. As a pattern, decades of neglect of the common interest under "neoliberalism" worsen the situation, whereas its present character has been triggered by the higher costs of credit everywhere, and matching monetary policy. Of course the conditions are often falsely blamed on migrants. We all know how that works, and no doubt we broadly agree that it's bullshit.
Gurgen In any event, your assertion that I share responsibility for the success of Wilders is absolutely laughable and frankly offensive. So if we're going down the path of absurdity I'm done here.
Fair play. I'm happy to sidestep all that—I don't get the sense our respective positions are antithetical. And this post is not a point by point contradiction of your views or whatever.
The centre of politics in lots of places has condoned the virulent racist, anti-migrant rhetoric of the likes of Wilders. Instead of damning these ideas, they are enshrined as "legitimate concerns".
These ideas fuel a political circus with harmful outcomes: mass indefinite detention, failed and toxic preemptive deradicalisation programs, neurotic headscarf bans, it goes on. These outcomes appear instead of what voters were implicitly promised: economic security, personal well-being, a place to live and bills paid, all that goes on in its scarcity.
For some of the disappointed, there is a residual pleasure in the spectacle of the social or state punishment of othered people: incipient fascist enjoyment in other words.
The sustained illusions make more distant any mass political address of the tyranny of capital ("doing something about neoliberalism" if you prefer).
It never makes sense to look at a figure like Wilders (or Trump, or Johnson, or Hanson or Morrison) and say "you've got to admit they've got a point", "they're just saying what everyone is thinking" or "this was bound to happen". Anything true they say is only linked in turn to a dangerous lie.
As for those who vote for racist demagogues, it's not tactical for anyone in public life to call them all racists. But some people do need to be politically defeated rather than respectfully persuaded. That's just how it is.
Side point but I also disagree with a "mirrored epiphenomena" view of far right racism in comparison to what is being termed "woke nonsense" or antiracism in this conversation. Obviously many critiques of liberal or corporate "diversity politics" are well and good.
