There is no greater threat to humanity’s well-being and the advancement of society than the con known as “conservative” politics.
Somehow, in what we call the ‘West’, those who upheld the white supremacist colonial and imperialist patriarchy from the start, who in essence opposed measures of equality and justice at every turn, managed to convince the world that there were two branches of political thought of which they are by necessity one.
This “half” of political thought remains steadfastly opposed to society itself: the idea not only that we are all equal, but that we should live together and by doing so help each other wheresoever and whenever that help is required. They are particularly opposed to helping women, brown and black peoples, queers, the disabled and the elderly. Conservatives do not believe in democratic government, they believe in aristocracy, the rule of the wealthy; the ruinous impact of climate change in the present, and threat of worse to come, has shown that this belief in their own superiority is so total that not even the end of human civilisation can convince them to change.
There is no future for civilisation should this illusory branding of “left” and “right” politics continue. The default state of our governance is one that credits an overtly racist, classist, sexist, ableist and homophobic cabal of (mostly) rich white men as a major political party whose ideas are worthy of our highest public offices. The fact that the “left”, when in party, largely hews to discourse and policy this cabal sets forth is why I put these designations in quotation marks. These labels have accrued so much cultural meaning as to have become deeply obscuring. What matters is not the label, but the value of the actions taken by any individual or party; what matters is the pursuit of justice and equality above all. Without that all we have is the continued operation of an evil system which is rotting the world in real-time.
What would our society look like if we established a foundation of irrevocable equality whereby discrimination was not permissible let alone debatable? Whereby your gender was yours to determine, your adult relationships were yours to determine, your bodily autonomy was unquestioned except, as usual, in cases where physically harming another; whereby your right to a living wage, to housing, food, water, power and education, was unquestioned and irrevocable. It is astonishing that we do not have this already, that we exist in a constant state of futile debate about who deserves to be poor and how best to punish them out of it, or who can call themselves whatever they want, or who can choose to give birth, or who can live in a certain country.
It is more than astonishing, it is terrifying that not only are these things not guaranteed, not only are they subject to constant debate, but that the status quo of rich old racists have managed to ensure that they are winning. The framing that facilitates this is that every idea has equal merit, or should be tolerated equally as much as another, no matter how toxic, violent or stupid those notions are, which is obviously absurd. The desire to abuse someone based on their position in the hierarchy established by white cishetero patriarchy is not equally as valid as the right to not be abused––physically, socially, financially or otherwise. So long as these basic equalities and rights are subject to debate, they are winning, and we can see this poison has travelled so far as to infect not only the present but also the past, where “conservatives”, those champions of genocidal slaveowners and racist imperialism, are banning the teaching of historical facts which might lead one to understand how and why discrimination and inequality was built into the system.
Let me take a moment here to say I don’t give a damn about freedom of speech. I don’t even care so much about freedom itself, in all honesty, whatever that abstraction might mean to you––I have only ever seen it invoked to cause violence against an already abused group. My responsibility to be a decent person will forever have more weight than any notion of freedom; in fact I see that responsibility not as a yoke or burden but as the key to being my fullest self.
It is impossible at any rate to have any genuinely “free” debate in a system that is controlled by those with the most to “lose” in said debate. This is how they understand it––that any measurable gain in equality is a “loss” for the wealthy, and particularly for whiteness. A loss in their status, prestige, in their perception of themselves as not only above the system but as desirable, and most importantly, in their potential to remain obscenely wealthy via their exploitative empires. It is impossible to have a genuine debate in a media system that is owned in half by one man, and which is majority-owned by conservatives, or the rich, who, again, see themselves as having the most to lose if the conversation is uncontrolled. What we have, instead, are manufactured outrages that endlessly elevate the extremes of any position; that invariably reinforce the idea that having “the conversation” is as important as any imagined outcome, no matter how often said conversation has occurred in public, in literature etc., before; and that deliberately obscure the mechanics of power.
Social media has surely been the greatest boon to the elites in society––the millionaires and billionaires, to be clear, not the fantasy “elites” put forward as decoys, like artists and teachers and tertiary educated people––in the history of the world. For no better reason than it allows us the illusion of free speech and collective action, it allows us to vent, to be intangibly rewarded for the action of witnessing and of speaking truth to power, without ever actually doing anything. Then, when nothing changes, despite having done nothing, cynicism takes root. Worse, where before the elites would have to send spies into activist groups, into union meetings and intellectual spaces, not just to report on what was said but to sow discord and division, now the conversation is taking place online all the time, and the ability to derail it is equally available.
They are killing us and they are killing the possibility of a habitable future, all to the sound of a civil discourse slowly morphing into the gunfire of fascists.
What keeps us in line? The self-fulfilling prophecy of other hostile world-powers? The autocrats and dictators who maintain their grip on power, many of whom were in fact established or aided by the West, not only to maintain a brutal economic system and extraordinary transfer of wealth, but also as future enemies to war with once their usefulness has expired? The constant presence of a worse evil to make tolerable this supposed “lesser” one. This plays out both in the supposed divide between left and right, as it does more broadly on the macro level. That’s part of it, setting the limit of our imagination sets the boundary of the discourse, but there’s more to it. There’s the guilt and terror of settler-colonialism, the paranoid insecurity of any thief determined to escape retribution (having no ability to imagine restorative justice, or indeed, love), which loops into a fatalistic denial, a fevered grip on the noose strangling Indigeneity so as to maintain the daily present. I use thief in the present tense because anyone who inherits something stolen and refuses to return it, refuses even to share equally the benefits of that wealth, is re-enacting the theft. No matter how poor this present, unreasoning terror of worse overrides it. There’s the crushing grind of work, the mind-numbing burden of fighting for your life every week, the fact that this scarcity starves the spirit, whittles it into an ever smaller flicker. There’s the prejudices allowed to stay current, to be inflamed every single week due to our baffling tolerance of so-called conservative ideas which are simply age-old evils and inequities.
And there is, fundamentally, an unwillingness to believe in our capacity for better, which is tied to a self-loathing damnation of our complicity in the present.
So how do we get out of this? Can you even imagine a we? Who is there when you think it? This is important. I have no time for anyone who thinks otherwise, the self-pitying who have bought into the defeatist idea that writing, that language, is useless. Language is the basis of everything; it is how we know each other, how we articulate the divine, how we make tangible to our imperfect bodies the scope of love, the boundlessness of the sacred, be it through speech or text, the syntax of touch or the alphabet of desire. I’m often asked about the responsibility of writing––and in truth there is some over-emphasis on its utility which is bound up both in romantic myths and in its reliance on government funding––for, or about “my” community, and I always try to make clear that a) community is not static, or singular, but multiple and fluctuating, and b) that I am as concerned with creating community as I am with existing therein. Here I quote Dr Brittney Cooper, who I met once years ago at the Sydney Writers Festival. I was relating to her some frustration with my less educated brother who told me he didn’t understand my poetry—can I really be said to doing work for the community if said community didn’t read or understand it? She said something like, “Trust that our communities summon what they need to survive, even if some don’t comprehend it. And while you should be mindful of who you’re representing, you are also doing the work of summoning what you need to survive.”
That is, I have a responsibility not just to the present, but also to the future, to the kind of community I want to exist, and I suspect that this is the crux of many people’s issues with the act of writing as an act of service: it lacks the immediacy of the brick thrown through the window, it is engaged primarily in the slow work of legacy, of generational knowing. It was Toni Morrison who said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” I think we have to give it, this language, this measuring, the full weight it deserves. It is as important as the brick that is thrown, because behind that brick, bunched in the muscles of the arm that threw it, is the coil of literature and language without which it would not spring, and it is language that we will use to explain why, to describe what occurred, and to define the harm so as to enable a healing.
More than anything else, I believe we must get past the endless circle of “conversation”, the endless allowance for debate. We must move out of the “marketplace of ideas”, which even as a metaphor, is deeply flawed—who owns the marketplace? Which ideas are given the most space, the loudest speakers? Who owns the stalls? Who is allowed to enter it? Can you not imagine an exchange of values beyond price, beyond being bought?—and into the field of justice, into the ocean of equality. When equality is irrevocable, and human rights aren’t subject to the whim of each election cycle, then we can finally start to have the kind of interesting and honest conversations we need to progress as a society and a species.