02 2000
Why Do We All Love to Hate Haider?
The prospect of Joerg Haider's Freidemokraten participation
in the Austrian government aroused horror in the entire spectrum
of the "legitimate democratic" political block in
the Western world: from the Social Democratic Left to the
Christian conservatives, from Chirac to Clinton - not to mention,
of course, Israel -, they all expressed "worries"
and announced at least symbolic measures of Austria's diplomatic
quarantine, untill this disease disappears or is proven not
really dangerous.
Some commentators perceive this horror as the proof of how
the basic post-World-War-II anti-Fascist democratic consensus
in Europe still holds - are, however, things really so unequivocal?
The first thing to do here is to recall the well-concealed,
but nonetheless unmistakable, sigh of relief in the predominant
democratic political field, when, a decade ago, the Rightist
populist parties became a serious presence in Europe. The
message of this relief was: finally the enemy whom we can
all together properly hate, whom we can sacrifice - excommunicate
- in order to demonstrate our democratic consensus! This relief
is to be read against the background of what is usually referred
to as the emerging "post-political consensus."
The two-party system, the predominant form of politics in
our post-political era, is the appearance of a choice where
there is basically none. Both poles converge on their economic
policy - recall recent elevations, by Clinton and Blair, of
the "tight fiscal policy" as the key tenet of the
modern Left: the tight fiscal policy sustains economic growth,
and growth allows us to play a more active social policy in
our fight for better social security, education and health...
The difference of the two parties is thus ultimately reduced
to the opposed cultural attitudes: multiculturalist, sexual
etc. "openness" versus traditional "family
values." And, significantly, it is the Rightist option
that addresses and attempts to mobilize whatever remains of
the mainstream working class in our Western societies, while
the multiculturalist tolerance is becoming the motto of new
privileged "symbolic classes" (journalists, academics,
managers...). This political choice - Social Democrat or Christian
Democrat in Germany, Democrat or Republican... - cannot but
remind us of our predicament when we want artificial sweetener
in an American cafeteria: the all-present alternative of Nutra-Sweet
Equal and High&Low, of blue and red small bags, where
almost each person has his/her preferences (avoid the red
ones, they contain cancerous substances, or vice-versa), where
this ridiculous sticking to one's choice merely accentuates
the utter meaninglessness of the alternative.
And does the same not go for late TV talk shows, where the
"freedom to choose" is the choice between Jay Leno
and David Letterman? Or for the soda drinks: Coke or Pepsi?
It is a well-known fact that the "Close the door"
button in most elevators is a totally disfunctional placebo,
placed there just to give the individuals the impression that
they are somehow participating, contributing to the speed
of the elevator journey - when we push this button, the door
closes in exactly the same time as when we just pressed the
floor button without "speeding up" the process by
pressing also the "Close the door" button. This
extreme case of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor
of the participation of individuals in our "postmodern"
political process.
And this brings us back to Haider: significantly, the only
political force with the serious weight which DOES still evoke
an antagonistic response of Us against Them is the new populist
Right - Haider in Austria, le Pen in France, Republicans in
Germany, Buchanan in the US. A strange thing took place in
New York politics at the end of November 1999: Lenora Fulani,
the Black activist from Harlem, has endorsed Patrick Buchanan's
Reform Party presidential candidacy, declaring that she will
try to bring him to Harlem and mobilize the voters there on
his behalf. While both partners admitted their differences
on a number of key issues, they stressed "their common
economic populism, and particulary their antipathy for free
trade." Wherefore this pact between Fulani, the far-Left
espouser of Marxist-Leninist politics, and Buchanan, a Reaganite
cold warrior and the leading Right-wing populist figure?
The liberal common wisdom has a quick answer to it: extremes
- Righ and Left "totalitarianism" - meet in their
rejection of democracy, and especially today, in their common
inability to adapt to the new trends of the global economy.
Furthermore, do they not share the anti-Semitic agenda? While
the anti-Semitic bias of the radical African-Americans is
well-known, who does not remember Buchanan's provocative designation
of the US Congress as an "Israeli occupied territory"?
Against this liberal platitudes, one should focus on what
effectively unites Fulani and Buchanan: they both (pretend
to) speak on behalf of the proverbial "disappearing working
class." In today's ideological perception, work itself
(manual labor as opposed to "symbolic" activity),
not sex, becomes the site of obscene indecency to be concealed
from the public eye? The tradition which goes back to Wagner's
Rheingold and Lang's Metropolis, the tradition in which the
working process takes place underground, in dark caves, today
culminates in the millions of anonymous workers sweating in
the Third World factories, from Chinese gulags to Indonesian
or Brasil assembly lines - in their invisibility, the West
can afford itself to babble about the "disappearing working
class." But what is crucial in this tradition is the
equation of labor with crime, the idea that labor, hard work,
is originally an indecent criminal activity to be hidden from
the public eye.
Today, the two superpowers, USA and China, more and more relate
as Capital and Labor. The US is turning into a country of
managerial planning, banking, servicing, etc., while its "disappearing
working class" (except for migrant Chicanos and others
whi work predominantly in servicing economy) is reappearing
in China, where the large part of the US products, from toys
to electronc hardware, is manufactured in conditions ideal
for capitalist exploitation: no strikes, limited freedom of
movement of the working force, low wages... Far from being
simply antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is thus
at the same time deeply symbiotic. The irony of history is
that China fully deserves the title "working class state":
it is the state of the working class for the American capital.
The only place in Hollywood films where we see the production
process in all its intensity are when the action hero penetrates
the master-criminal's secret domain and locates there the
site of intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs,
constructing a rocket that will destroy New York...). When,
in a James Bond movie, the master-criminal, after capturing
Bond, usually takes him on a tour of his illegal factory,
is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist
proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the
function of Bond's intervention, of course, is to explode
in firecraks this site of production, allowing us to return
to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the
"disappearing working class"...
This brings us to the reason why the new populist Right plays
the key structural role in the legitimacy of the new liberal-democratic
hegemony. They are the negative common denominator of the
entire center-left liberal spectrum: they are the excluded
ones who, through this very exclusion (their inacceptability
as the party of the government) provide the negative legitimacy
of the liberal hegemony, the proof of their "democratic"
attitude. In this way, their existence displaces the TRUE
focus of the political struggle (which is, of course, the
stifling of any Leftist radical alternative) to the "solidarity"
of the entire "democratic" bloc against the racist
neo-Nazi etc. danger. Therein resides the ultimate proof of
the liberal-democratic hegemony of today's ideologico-political
scene, the hegemony which was accomplished with the emergence
of the "Third Way" social democracy. The "Third
Way" is precisely social democracy under the hegemony
of liberal-democratic capitalism. i.e. deprived of its minimal
subversive sting, excluding the last reference to anti-capitalism
and class struggle.
Furthermore, it is absolutely crucial that the new Rightist
populists are the only "serious" political force
today which addresses the people with the anti-capitalist
rhetorics, although coated in nationalist/racist/religious
clothing (multinational corporations who "betray"
the common decent working people of our nation). At the congress
of the Front National a couple of years ago, le Pen brought
to stage an Algerian, an African and a Jew, embraced them
all and told the gathered public: "They are no less French
than I am - it is the representatives of the big multinational
capital, ignoring their duty to France, who are the true danger
to our identity!" Hypocritical as such statements are,
they nonetheless signal how the populist Right is moving to
occupy the terrain left vacant by the Left.
Here, the liberal-democratic New Middle (as it is called in
Germany) plays a double game: it puts forward Righist populists
as our common true enemy, while it effectively manipulates
this Rightist scare in order to hegemonize the "democratic"
field, i.e. to define the terrain and win over, discipline,
its true adversary, the radical Left. And in the events like
Haider's party's participation in the government (which, let
us not forget, has a precedent in the Fini's neo-Fascist Alleanza
Nazionale's participation in the Berlusconi government a couple
of years ago in Italy!), the post-political and post-ideological
New Middle gets its own message back in its inverted - true
- form. The participation in the government of the far Right
is the price the Left is paying for its renunciation of any
radical political project, for accepting market capitalism
as "the only game in town".