All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their…

All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their privilege is just ‘how things are’. They don’t have to fight for identity, so it disappears from their view. A few short thoughts on Dan’s Tweet. #auspol /1 https://t.co/c0AN0lTmEY

The dominant Covid narrative in Western nations is all about inconvenience. SARS-Cov-2 is not an existential threat in their eyes, elite societies no longer recognise those. They feel themselves to be masters of the universe. That’s the (silent) collective identity. /2

Surely there’s a technology to make all this go away, so we can go back to our lives, country-hopping on planes? To ‘see’ the world, everybody else’s homes are pages from our tourist handbooks. A technology that slots neatly into customary elite lives, to minimise disruption. /3

Of course, that’s how we use the vaccines. We’re going to get that quick jab, and it’s all over with. The fact that we have pretty much all of the vaccines for our own use also disappears into the background. Fish don’t know water exists, until they’re beached. /4

Covid beached us. We’re not seeing it yet. Mostly because there’s very little ‘we’ left. Decades of libertarian politics has turned any idea of a collective society into a multiplicity of individual democratic customers. The pandemic to us is like bad customer service. /5 https://t.co/xSFkNr60ml

Only privilege allows a society to become a giant shopping mall of individual desires and beliefs. Where life becomes an individual career trajectory. All of the collective, ongoing work to maintain that individual lifestyle existence has become invisible to most of us. /6

Politically we fudge all of this by claiming our democracies value diversity. But it’s not so much that they value it, it’s that individual tastes, beliefs, ideologies etc. are all that we have left. We have nothing to draw them all together into any unified whole or wholes. /7

When things don’t work, as they increasingly don’t, we retreat into hyper-individualism. Every microscopic nuance of *personal* identity becomes a new political platform to live or die over. All sides of politics do it, all wallowing in the same libertarian wasteland. /8

I don’t know how this pandemic will end. We’ve used it mostly as more fuel for our hyper-individualised identity-based politics. We have no idea how to think or act collectively now. The best we can muster is constant new inflections on our beloved individual lifestyle egos. /9

Have Tweeted a few times that even those who want to act collectively/internationally/globally do it by trying to glue back together all of these hyper-individualised identities. Like Frankenstein’s monster, made up of random body parts. It’s backwards. /10

You have to go back to the time before the libertarian splintering. Trying to make collective things out of libertarian things only reinforces the whole libertarian fantasy. It assumes we’re all isolated libertarian individuals - they win, we’re using their framing. /11

The way out of this mess is to deny that whole toxic fantasy of libertarian ideas. Individuals and groups, nations and globes, are not binaries. No altruism needed. What’s good for all of us collectively is also what’s best for us as individuals. /12

Ultimately it means re-focusing on the *practical* ways we maintain societies. Our institutions, the engineering under the hood. Away from ideals, towards infrastructure. The stuff that falls over in the libertarian heartlands, like Brexit Britain. The basic public health…/13

…work that stops us all getting TB and measles every year, for example. That controls the quality of our air. Etc. Our identity politics ignores all of that practical stuff, we’re aristocrats who don’t notice the servants that keep our lives afloat./end