Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It…

Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse of ordinary community-based political life shadowed by a rapid increase…/1 https://t.co/bJjbngIJww

…in individual moral outrage and personal ‘statements’ (in the action sense too) bordering on the puritanical. Not a surprise, because the N=1 politics whose focus has been the stripping away of the public or community as the bedrock of politics, and…/2

…its replacement with individualism, has left people (as Waleed says) profoundly uneasy about some of the ‘freedoms’ this has liberated. The freedom to be a bigot, for example. More broadly I think this has led to the explosive growth of ‘identity’ politics, as millions of../3

…now semi-isolated individuals are left with nothing to express their political rights with except constantly reinvented individual passions. Across the whole spectrum, Left to Right, this is politics now. What we sometimes call ‘culture wars’. But really there’s no…/4

…culture in play here, nothing collective. It’s tribalism, the fracturing of a national community into smaller and smaller groupings defined around a bewildering array of individual thoughts and feelings. Like an ongoing civil war. All the logical outcome of stripping away…/5

..the ‘commons’ as the basis of politics, and replacing it with an international market full of 8 billion customers. Politics for us has become a battle of brands. We’re trapped in the idiot belief system of market-based politics, living in an economy instead of a society. /6

The puritanism of the moral outrage is people desperately trying to reinstate some form of territorial sovereignty for themselves, now the old community framework which provided that stability before is gone. Nobody really wants to be a free-floating customer of international…/7

…economic politics. The only real sovereignty you have in that worldview is how much money you have, and for most of us that’s not a lot. So we’ve retreated to inside our own bodies and minds, to our ideas and feelings, as a last territorial stand. The impotence we feel../8

…as societies collapse around us it what feeds the puritan outrage, the fury is real but the outlet for it has now shrunk from the national and international to the individual. /end