This is an artifact of the securitization of all discourse as a legacy of the war on terror. If high modernism was the shared language of politics, across the spectrum, during the Cold War, the language of safety and security has replaced it since 9/11 on both the left and right. 1/ - ThreadSky

privatechand.bsky.social • 10 days ago

This is an artifact of the securitization of all discourse as a legacy of the war on terror. If high modernism was the shared language of politics, across the spectrum, during the Cold War, the language of safety and security has replaced it since 9/11 on both the left and right. 1/

Reposted from Hardeep Matharu

"If we don't allow politicians to converse in a way that isn't reduced to simplicities, that leaves a vacuum of complexity filled by populists who sound like they are talking with substance"

A big win of the modern right has been to close the space in which nuance can even sit.

My culture piece 👇

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privatechand.bsky.social•10 days ago

Securitization disempowers. As more and more aspects of governance was subsumed by the security state, globally states mobilized the politics of safety to brand enemies terrorists and increase its powers of surveillance and intolerance of dissidence. Modi played that game in Gujarat brilliantly. 2/

privatechand.bsky.social•10 days ago

Modernization at least allowed subaltern subjects to articulate demands of states on the grounds of its promised benefits. Securitization is a zero sum game: either you are safe or you are not. The result is when states undertook draconian measures and nothing adverse happened, well it’s working 3/

privatechand.bsky.social•10 days ago

If something adverse happens, then it’s cause for the state to ramp up security. It’s an endless cycle. While securitization may have begun on the right, a counterpart of that emerged on the left in terms of a similarly zero sum game of a politics of safety. It’s exactly what Zionists mobilized 5/

privatechand.bsky.social•10 days ago

Mobilizing the real dangers and fears of anti-semitism, Zionists mobilized the politics of safety to quash dissent surrounding the Gazan genocide, using the state to do so. It was the clearest example of how vulnerable a leftist politics of safety is to hijacking by the securitized state. 5/

privatechand.bsky.social•10 days ago

This politics exists in the context of an overarching emotional regime (in William Reddy’s framework) of fear. The result is complexity is immediately branded threat and moral danger. It’s a problem across the political spectrum. 6/

privatechand.bsky.social•10 days ago

What decent person is going to debate nuance if the other person claims to feel unsafe or threatened by the debate itself? The resulting intolerance of social complexity inevitable serves the right, which ultimately offer homogeneity as the only form of stable social order. 7/

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