We are living through one of history’s greatest paradoxes — in Canada

The Politics of Isolation

CHARLIE ANGUS / THE RESISTANCE / Substack / JUL 31 

There have been countless books written about the political crisis of our time, but one small book stands out. Hyperpolitics, by Belgian historian Anton Jäger, puts forward the thesis that the dramatic failure of left and centrist politics is rooted in the increasing isolation of people from each other — “the atomization” of society.

We are living through one of history’s greatest paradoxes.

Never before have we had such unprecedented access to information in a world wired together with the ease of a click on a screen, yet people feel more disoriented, more isolated and more detached than ever.

Jäger captures this contradiction when he writes,

“People are lonelier in the new century, but also more agitated; more atomized, but more connected; angrier yet more disconnected.”

As I was reading Hyperpolitics, I was doing research for a side project on the Porcupine (Timmins) region of Northern Ontario during the Great depression. What struck me was how different people were back then because they lived within a complex web of social relationships.

The Porcupine mining region was very multicultural. People were identified by their religion, family ties, ethnicity, political affiliation, place of work and class. Families were larger. Kids played outside together. Neighbours looked out for one another.

My mother had cousins and aunts who all lived on the same street. This was the norm.

Those families were active members of churches, the synagogue and ethnic organizations that held people together through a busy schedule of gatherings, meetings, reflections, dances, plays, picnics, and youth activities.

Ethnic solidarity was expressed through shared membership in the various clubs and halls: the Caledonian Society, the Hibernian Society, the Lancashire Club, St. David’s Welsh Society, the Cornish Social Club, the Croatian Hall, the Polish Hall, the Sons of Italy Club, The local Hadassah Chapter, the Ukrainian Workers hall (left-wing) and the Provista Ukrainian Hall (anti-communist), the same was for the so-called Red Finns and the White Finns.

Social and fraternal clubs boasted large memberships — the International Order of the Daughters of the Empire, the Rebekah Lodge, les Chevaliers de Colomb, the Kiwanis. People studied at Christian Science, joined local choirs or participated in regular meetings for the Jack Miner League for conservation.

Members of the working class might attend meetings of the competing co-operative societies or attend political debates and lectures. The management class were likely to be active in the Orange Lodge, the golf club or other men’s associations.

Sports played a huge role, with a robust baseball league, hockey teams, a football (soccer) league, the tennis club, and multiple youth organizations. All groups required volunteers, coaches, trainers, and, of course, the people to come out and cheer on their local favourites.

Timmins even had a chapter of the Ancient Order of Froth Blowers, founded in England supposedly to do good deeds. Their real goal seems to have been a club for drinking and mocking the work of the Temperance Union.

These organizations were sustained by volunteer participation in a world where many people worked six days a week. People didn’t live as individuals but as part of their community, their religious group, their class. They were held together in a web of belief, obligation and mutual support.

That world is long gone. It began to disintegrate in the years following the Second World War as rising standards of living and the shift to the suburbs created the idealized notion of the nuclear family living on their own.

By the 1990s, a pattern of increasing isolation and the concurrent breakdown of social involvement began to be noted. The book Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam, published in 2000, documented the fraying social structure of life in North America.

Putnam charted how rising levels of isolation were having an impact on social and political cohesion:

“People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”

This trend was exacerbated in the political realm after the fall of the Berlin Wall with the triumphalism that we had reached the “end of history.”

As unions were defanged in the UK and the United States, the market became the final arbitrator of all social and political problems. Those who still believed in building a better world through mass meetings and organizing were considered out of touch.

Margaret Thatcher played a huge role in this shift with her proclamation that there was no such thing as society; there were only individuals.

She bragged that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair. The Labour leader was the leading evangelist of early 21st-century “progressive” leaders who promoted deregulating the market for the big boys and privatizing government services.

Where once we had leaders pushing national health care, pollution legislation, and commitments to improving access to national health care, the post-Cold War politicians offered the promises of petty transactional change.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk notes that when it came to imagining a better world, the political centre abandoned the field.

“When Western men and women style themselves as ‘democrats’ today, they do not so out of any pretence of contributing to the public good, but because they rightly regard democracy as the type of society that allows them not to think about the state and the art of belonging together.”

On the far right, the opposite was true.

The ideological right didn’t feel triumphant about the collapse of communism; they became even more threatened. Their enemy wasn’t communism but government itself. In interviews following the fall of communism, Milton Friedman railed about the dangers of a post-Cold War world because government would consider reinvesting money from military spending into social investments.

Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, in his book Hayek’s Bastards, has written about the rise of far-right militancy following the fall of the Wall. Think tanks, right-wing writers, and militarized militias began laying out the program for a full-out war on government, law, universities and even democracy itself.

Economist Murray Rothbard pushed a radical approach of shifting energy from think tank debates to building resentment among the growing underclass. It was about “whipping up the masses directly” in what he called “a strategy of Outreach to the Rednecks.”

This laid the groundwork for the militant ideology that became MAGA. Their opportunity came with the economic collapse of 2008.

More than nine million Americans lost their homes in the subprime disaster. In the confusion and despair of the economic disaster, the far right blamed the “elites.” They were careful to divert attention from the hedge funds and the rising oligarchs who drove the crash and benefited from the catastrophe.

This was a moment when the democratic centre/left should have responded with a commitment to help those hammered by the likes of Goldman Sachs. Instead, they bailed out the bankers and ensured that bonuses were paid to the very CEO’s who caused so much hardship.

It opened the door for the online influencers, right-wing television hosts and a militant wave of Republican politicians to preach the message that the problem lay with the “elite” – centrist politicians, university professors and social planners with their supposedly woke solutions of equity and inclusion.

In a world where people were increasingly isolated and tuning out of traditional media, resentment as a political creed was an easy sell. Much harder was the work of building resistance to the inequity. This is because the notion of social solidarity had long since disintegrated.

Jäger writes:

“Just as employment has become more precarious in the post-industrial era, abandoning a family, a relationship, a party is much less demanding… Temporally, such ease of exit produces a society in which all dimensions of life are subject to short-term logics; friendships, marriages, jobs and political commitments are compressed into ever shorter time frames.”

Those who have tried to organize unions in the face of the Uber economy faced two immense challenges.

The first is that the gilded age of 21st capitalism is ruthless in its determination to break any efforts at workplace solidarity. The second is that a new generation of workers has been raised in the nowhere land of isolation and transactional politics:

“Employees with no hope of permanent position are unlikely to identify strongly with their professional vocation. Even at the lower rungs of the labour market, individuals relate to affiliations as investors at the stock exchange, allocating resources and withdrawing them once the return on investment is no longer guaranteed.”

In such a world, building solid and sustainable solidarity networks becomes very difficult.

So where do we go from here?

If we remain isolated and addicted to our phones, we will continue to be pummelled by the unrelenting aggression of the far right.

Restoring democracy requires active community engagement. It means building from the ground up – volunteering, getting involved, creating webs of friendships and allies.

That is a long-term project. But it is all we have because nobody is coming to save us.

We need to remember the adage: united we stand because we have learned the hard way that divided is how we fell.

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