Progressives Across The Pond

In the 1960s, blues loving British musicians somehow managed to sell American roots music to the Americans. Because we now live in the darkest timeline, we’re getting the complete opposite.

We are living in a time when fascist loving young British opinion-havers are somehow being exported back to Britain after rising to the top of the alt-right wave that Trump is the crest of.

This tweet is clearly disturbing.

It is doubly disturbing because I found myself trying to remind people who Neil Hamilton was just so I could insult him for sending it out. It is such an oddly phrased tweet I can’t help but wonder if he wrote it himself.

Perhaps he fell asleep and the alt-right ate his brain.

For those of you who don’t live on the internet, the people Hamilton mentions might be unfamiliar. They are:

PrisonPlanet — Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars editor and YouTube ranter, who’s most recent post involved cold-eyed screaming about how no one on the left really cares about immigrant families being torn apart at the border.

Sargon of Akkad — Youtube personality famous for boosting alt-right figures and the classic opposition to “identity politics”.

Count Dankula — Got nicked for putting a video of his pug, which he has trained to give a Nazi salute, on YouTube. Oh and he was making a ‘joke’ about the Holocaust too.

Milo Yiannopoulos — former Breitbart editor, famous for recently calling for the murder of journalists and also getting shitcanned for saying on a podcast that he wasn’t opposed to fucking kids.

It’s not quite The Rolling Stones is it?

All in all, it was a good time to interview Nathan H. Rubin, the founder of Millennial Politics, a newly founded organisation dedicated to promoting progressive candidates running for office in America. This is very much an organisation built out of the rubble of Trump’s hate fuelled rise to the White House.

“In my mind, there was always someone else to work in politics — I don’t have to do it. But after the Trump election it dawned on me that I do have some extra time, I do have extra capacity, I am passionate about these things, I should do something to benefit and help move the country in the direction that I want.”

Rubin is convinced that Millennials lean left, despite the ominous crowds of young be-chinoed men with Tiki torches. All the lefty youth just don’t get the same air time.

Donald Trump brought out the xenophobia and racism that already lay under the surface. That’s part of how the alt-right came to prominence — they weren’t worried about being shut out of the discourse anymore because how can we ignore them when we spend so much time paying attention to Trump?

One way to get around it is to focus on local politics, looking to the local level and trying to engage with voters, asking them what they want and who they want to vote for rather than telling them who their candidate should be.

“Putting the resources in your local communities is an easy way to make a difference.”

Young progressives who want to find their platform need to leverage digital media, because Donald Trump is a vacuum that sucks up all of the traditional media attention. But that is where the utter incivility and fury of online discourse has begun to eat people’s brains, destroying any semblance of conversation and convincing people that only their side has all the facts.

“We’re at a point in our public discourse where people don’t necessarily want facts. They don’t want statistics, they don’t want data or policy positions; they want truths. If you say ‘Medicare for all’ or ‘single payer option’ or ‘public option’ that falls on deaf ears. But if you go to people and say ‘healthcare is a human right nobody should go bankrupt for getting sick’ that connects with people.”

We know online politics is in a dodgy state. Public trust is low and falling in the age of fake news and the platforms look complicit in that. There is a danger to reading too far into the activities of relatively niche groups and organisations and seeing the whole of society. We saw it most recently with the hysteria around Cambridge Analytica and their spooky ability to brainwash a nation — but that doesn’t seem likely.

What’s more likely is we have a media status quo that can’t help but find the scandal and outrage, so people who now have the ability to make videos and podcasts and blog posts realize they can get famous by being scandalous and outrageous.

The solution? Start having more conversations with people like Nathan (or us).

You’ll feel much better afterwards.