Thread by @ProfAFinlayson

The instinct of mainstream politicians & commentators is to ‘depoliticise’ far right & racist street politics - by calling it thuggery, explaining it as a kind of ‘mistake’ caused by disinformation etc. They don’t want to ‘dignify’ it by admitting it to the Court (1/x)

They want to make it into a thing to ‘manage’ in a technical way: policing, media regulation etc. 

I get why they think that.

That used to work. But not now. Not really.

The ‘mainstream’ doesn’t  understand it’s not the mainstream anymore (2/x)

In digital culture, for many people, what politicians & official journalists say is a weird minority worldview that is on the way out: liberalism/wokism/‘the left’ etc. And being expelled from it feels to them like proof they must be right (3/x)

For 10+ years an alternative political worldview has been growing. Reactionary Digital Politics: anti-equality, sees ‘race’ as a key organising principle of politics (& other ‘natural’ variations esp. sex). It doesn’t want to win power in the liberal state but to destroy it (4/)

It has supporters in high places such as this platform (& some newspaper columnists) & has propelled ‘populists’ into parliaments. In this context, for actual/potential supporters, the ‘non-political’ moves of state liberalism in response to anti-Muslim race riots look weak (5/)

The state says the rioters are beyond the pale but never actually refutes their politics. It just says it’s not-politics, as if that’s enough, leaving the ideological field of conflict to the Reactionaries thinking it has only to reinforce a norm - but it’s no longer a norm (6/?)

Meanwhile state liberalism tends to reject those who do take up that ideological struggle - anti-racists, counter demonstrators etc. - because, of course, it’s fearful of that politics’ egalitarianism & extra-parliamentary orientation (7/?)

The point is, the situation didn’t start this weekend, the rioting is one part of a larger ideological bloc in formation & everything suggests the government has no serious analysis of what’s happened. Hence it relies on moral rhetorics of denunciation & on force (8/?)

At the moment what I see online is these riots being a big political success for Reactionary Digital Politics which represents the violence as ‘sad but inevitable’ & positions itself as the transgressive resistance against the liberal state that wants to harm children (9/?)

Knowing how to win elections is a key political skill. So’s being expert in policy technicalities. But so too is knowing how to fight in the ideological, cultural & rhetorical theatre. It’s obvious to us who haunt reactionary online spaces that Lab is failing at the latter (10/?)

I don’t really have tweetable ‘recommendations. Just that in politics it’s always later than you think, you need to know your enemies & sometimes those in high office need to be closer to the street and showing where they stand - politically.