Kel Varnsen I always reckon people are often more rational and knowledgeable than the commentariat may claim. For instance, I always thought Australian citizens were well aware how abominable the conditions in Australia's offshore black sites for refugee detention were, and that therefore awareness campaigns on the topic wouldn't achieve much.
The thing is, political reason always has to be pressed into the service of premises that may be brittle or subject to change.
One such premise might be "ordinary people like me can't easily change anything politically, so I've just got to look out for myself and my family above all". That could be perfectly rational ... within limits that can be exceeded by historical conditions or crisis.
As an obvious example, you have often asserted that people in the United States or Europe are "concerned about immigration" but you don't follow up to explain how the logic of this concern or any proposed concrete remedy in policy would unfold consistent with the economy.
We've had these debates on here for long enough now that we've seen many of these right wing populist, anti-migrant governments elected, but none has ever "addressed migration" in a way commensurate with people's "concerns" ... ? So what's the deal with that?
Trump comes to office as the candidate with aggressive rhetoric on "illegal" immigration, having promised a mass deportation as one of his first acts as President.
The usual logic of anti-migrant economic nationalists is that migration suppresses the wages of today's citizens. But hasn't the share of revenue going to labour in the United States falling for several decades hugely suppressed their wages as well? So why does our political rationality speak of the first thing but not the second?
It's because to act politically to address the deepening tyranny of capital—since globalisation, neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War dispersed the power of the labour movement—would require an extraordinary reopening of organised class struggle. I bet that's still a rationality referred to as "harmful extremism" by your Hugo Mercier fella. The words "class struggle" themselves are probably still nigh on extremism for the sensibles ...
