The One Fight Theory

Fairly regularly in the modern world there is a Happening™ that takes over for a few days. I'm sure you're familiar. In the wake of a Happening™ there are endless takes, jokes, questions and analyses, and then it all dies a way and we wait for the next one. And one of the things that routinely forms part of this discourse is a commentary on supposed hypocrisies brought to light.

I don't think these hypocrisies are actually hypocritical. In fact, the more I think about a lot of these events and the wider issues we're all currently, constantly watching in horror, the more I think absolutely everything is, not only consistent, but part of one ongoing fight.

The podcast If Books Could Kill jokes a lot about how there's really just one book. I think there's really just one fight.

This week's Happening™ is that terrible musician but solid man, Macklemore, got dropped from his support slot on terrible musician and terrible man, Ed Sheeran's current tour for saying Free Palestine. This was at the behest of dyed in the wool asshole Robert Kraft, who owns some of the stadiums the tour is set to hit. The hypocrisy here is that those same stadiums are also playing host to Kanye West, who's released merch and music and statements that are best described as Full Nazi.

Obviously this is not particularly original. We are flush with dipshits who decry objecting to the genocide currently taking place in Gaza as anti-semitic in one breath and suggest that Hitler was right in the next.

There are dozens of little inconstancies like this, spread across any number of discourses.

Racists trying to burn down hotels holding asylum seekers, claiming that they're more likely to be rapists, then being found guilty themselves for committing acts of sexual violence.

Terves insisting that trans activists think all butch lesbians are really trans men, then harassing any masculine presenting woman for not being cis enough.

A third thing, probably.

It's not that hard to understand what's behind each of these things within their own, small contexts.

Terfery and trans denialism could be understood as a broad objection to a variety of gender presentation for anyone, trans and cis alike. These people are uncomfortable when they're confronted with someone they can't immediately categorise. It's a conformist instinct, it's a fear of what's different.

Racists who are worried about black and brown men raping white women and girls, do not see those white women and girls as people. Rape used to be a property crime committed against the husband or father of the victim and, while the law has changed, the assumptions behind it haven't disappeared. Women who have been assaulted are damaged goods. They are goods.

When it comes to support for the state of Israel found alongside support for anti-semitism, you can take your pick from at least three options. There are people who want a good old fashioned expulsion of Jews from the west – let them all move to Israel so they won't be here. There are the deranged evangelicals and christian zionists who believe that Jewish people must be in Israel to bring about the apocalypse as described in Revelations. But for the rich it's about money. The Kraft Group LLC, of which Robert Kraft is CEO, has a lot of money tied up in private equity firms based in Israel. A lot of rich fucks have a lot of money tied up in Israeli investment groups. Israel as a corporate ally is entirely distinct from Jewish people as a group, so it's not inconsistent to protect your interest in the former while smiling and nodding at attacks on the latter.

Running through all of this is the question of control and who gets to have it.

I've been wondering recently if one the impact of living in my particular bubble has led to my being mistaken about how most people form a political ideology. For those who do, of course, which I realise is not everyone.

Low information voters are a different thing, although I do think it's easy to underestimate just how low information a lot of people really are. To illustrate this, I will talk briefly about The Lord of the Rings.

When I was a student I worked part time at a cinema in Christchurch, New Zealand. I was in that job at precisely the same time as The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released and it was honestly an eye-opening experience.

What you have to understand about The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand is that it was a massive deal. There were sets being constructed up and down the country, there were constant calls for extras, everyone knows someone who was involved in it, or at least knows someone who knows someone. There was something about that trilogy in the news essentially every day from the moment it was first announced right up until Return of the King won all the Oscars.

To me, it felt inescapable.

But then I stood at the door of screen one at Movieland, Hornby and listened to what people were saying as they went in and out of that film and I realised just how many people had, in fact, escaped it. People who didn't know it was a trilogy, who'd never heard of Peter Jackson, who were learning for the fist time that it filmed in New Zealand.

It felt insane to me then and it feels insane to me know, but I think it's helpful to recognise that lowkey being more or less aware of things, even at a low grade, mostly by osmosis level, is a little less common than you think. I don't blame people who are unaware of things for being unaware. Everyone's just trying to survive, having the time and the energy to keep up with the news isn't a given.

But I'd always basically believed that people who are engaged a bit, people who have developed their political beliefs with even a little bit of intention are doing it for the same reasons I am – even if their views are different. I'd always basically believed that most people developed their political beliefs according to what they think will make the world run well. That things will be better for the majority of people if their policies are enacted.

My political views are based on how I think society would best operate. It's a practical belief system – when I argue for my rabid progressive pet issues it's only in part because I believe in the fundamental dignity of all human people. It's also because I think a society that denies the fundamental dignity of all human people is, by nature, profoundly unstable.

And, despite the fact that I've always kind of dismissed conservative politics as largely for rich people who don't want to pay tax, I also assumed that, in general, conservative voters genuinely believe that free market capitalism and low inheritance tax will work for the good of all. Not everyone, of course, there have always been blatant grifters. But your common or garden Tory/Republican/National voter I'd always put down as, you know. Having an actual viewpoint.

I don't know if I was being hopelessly naive in the past or if I'm being brutally cynical now, but my views have shifted. I'm starting to think that the majority of these people are just selfish.

The more innocuous end of this is conservative influencers who insist they support things like LGBT+ rights and abortion access, they just don't want to pay taxes and don't want to be criticised for the language they use. The question there is always what language do you want to be using naturally, but they are in general a live and let live, but don't ask me to contribute bunch.

The other end is people joining ICE so they can brutalise their fellow man with impunity. People who harass the RNLI for not omitting asylum seekers from their rescue operations.

One of the aspects of fascism that I've found interesting in this era where we get to watch it all unfold in front of us after reading about it in textbooks is how much of it is voluntary. So much of what's happened in the US in Trump's second term is less because of specific laws that have been put into place (although there is that too, of course) and more about individual people feeling empowered to act on their own feelings.

TSA agents knowing they won't be fired for refusing entry to someone just because they don't like them, for example.

Fascism is an ideology of control and the people who support it do so because they believe that under fascism they will be one of the people who has control. That they will be able to exert that control over other people or, at the very least, they will be able to watch other people being controlled while being free to live their own lives as they choose.

I feel like just don't make me pay taxes and please let me be the one to crack the whip exist on a spectrum. I believe the opposition to both of them is we live in a society.

It's reductive, naturally, but I think it's helpful to sometimes step back as far as you can and consider a concept in its most basic form. It can be overwhelming to look at everything that's going wrong right now, to consider all there is to be done. The normalisation of white supremacy, the rolling back of LGBT+ rights, the tacit endorsement of settler colonial violence set against the backdrop of an ongoing genocide, continued environmental collapse etc, etc, etc.

But all of these problems have at their root an establishment that is desperately trying to accrue ever more wealth and power for themselves. I've said it before, but white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism all serve this end.

And this struggle has been going on for all of human history. There have always been people trying to keep control over where wealth and power accumulates and there have always been people trying to wrest that control from them, and distribute things more evenly among the population.

Everything is a class war. It's all the same fight.

It is for this reason that pleas for moderation on trans issues, for example, miss the point. The broad trans denialist project seeks to restrict the ability of trans people to exist in public and it does this by removing a fundamental human right: the right to privacy. When a government or political party acquiesces to this project, they are showing that they are unable or unwilling to defend the human rights of vulnerable people.

The entire point of the democratic project is to give ordinary people power over their own lives. To protect them from exploitation by the elite. If a government or political party sides with the elite over the vulnerable they are demonstrating that they do not consider themselves part of that project. It's a contradiction in terms and when we let them get away with it, when we continue to vote for them, we endorse their failure.

Obviously everything is complicated but sometimes, for a moment, it's helpful to consider things in their simplest terms.

Just because the problem is immense and many faceted, doesn't mean it's many problems. They're all connected. They're all one mosaic piece on the mirror ball from hell.