Monthly Muse: 4/2024
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the April 2024 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
The financial crisis of 2007-08 reignited debates over the ideology of TINA-ism. Popularized by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, “There Is No Alternative” became the watchword of the ascendant transatlantic neoliberal regime: In the TINA-ist worldview, deregulation, deindustrialization, and financialization were not policy choices, but, rather, inevitabilities of the market.
The Occupy Movement, for all of its flaws, mounted an ideological challenge to TINA-ism in 2011. This was arguably the last gasp of what had been called the anti- or alter-globalization movement. After Occupy, many things in America began to shift. As
has pointed out, the year 2012 was a major inflection point.While Hoel and others have focused on 2012 as a cultural turning point, I believe that this was also the beginning of a new post-Occupy political era. In this new period, dissident political movements focused less on identifying neoliberal TINA-ism as a common enemy; instead, they began to look for enemies from within their own ranks, a trend closely linked to the rise of a new brand of identity politics.
Why am I offering this quick and dirty account of the 2010s? Because I believe that it has a lot to do with where we find ourselves politically in 2024 America.
My article this month on Handful of Earth, entitled “In Defense of Woke Zoomers,” surveys the current political-ideological landscape with reference to the domestic debates on Israel and Palestine. While writing this piece, I was struck by just how fractured political movements have become in the United States. TINA feels like an appropriate term, still, but not for the same reasons as before.
Rather than indicate the ideology of no alternative to the overarching economic system, TINA now feels more like the existential condition of anyone trying to challenge that system. In other words, it seems as if there is no alternative to being pigeonholed into one of the warring factions in American politics, all of which seem more concerned with fighting each other as opposed to the actual ruling class TINA-ists.
This is a bleak situation. But we may be able to break out of this holding pattern if the best features of current movements are brought to the forefront and put into dialogue with one another. The America First foreign policy ethos of the contemporary MAGA movement and the anti-war slogans of pro-Palestinian campus activists may, in fact, have more in common with one other than first meets the eye. These movements are not static entities—they are dynamic forces. They are how we engage with them and what is collectively constructed in the process.
I resonate deeply with what
describes as a condition of “political homelessness.” At the same time, I am choosing to see the good in the movements around me, even if their members refuse to provide me shelter. My hope is that the best in these movements (rather than the worst, which is all too easy to point out) can pose a serious threat to the ruling class TINA-ism that has gone all but unchallenged since 2012.Provocation
“What is man's greatest human need in the United States today? It is to stop shirking responsibility and start assuming responsibility. When Americans stop doing the one and start doing the other, they will begin to travel the revolutionary road. But to do this they must use as much creative imagination in politics as up to now they have used in production. The fact is that the more imaginative Americans have been in creating new techniques of production, the less imaginative they have been in creating new relations between people. Americans today are like a bunch of ants who have been struggling all summer long to accumulate a harvest and then can't decide how to distribute it and therefore fight among themselves and destroy each other to get at the accumulation.”
—James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook