These are fair points. Unfortunately, I am pushed for time and am unable to do more than paint in broad brush strokes so I'll just reiterate where I stand right now on this. I have highlighted point 4 because that relates the most to the theme of this thread.
1. Since the late 70's neoliberalism has been in the ascendant.
2. It has resulted in rising levels of inequality pretty much everywhere it has been applied and has not delivered the levels of economic growth that were achieved prior to that time when Keynesian economics was the preferred model. That growth was actually higher even during the period of stagflation in the 70's.
3. Much economic policy-making from this angle is based on the model of homo economicus - the view that humans are narrowly individualistic, rational but self-interested creatures. This view has been shown to be demonstrably false by a range of multidisciplinary research.
4. It is the inequalities engendered by neoliberalism that have brought us to this point and the current strikes.
5. The need for facts in politics is predicated on a vision of a better future. They are required to underpin an aspiring politician’s vision, to demonstrate that it is achievable and will not collapse.
6.But what happens when the notion that free markets can deliver prosperity collapses, as it did in 2008? What do you turn to when you start to realize that this project has only increased economic inequality globally?
7. When that future disappears, what is the point of facts? Why would you want them when they tell you that your children will be poorer than you, or that climate change will have maybe the last word? Why should you trust the purveyors of facts, namely, 'left-wing' academics or that cabal of scientists who work for the IPCC?
8. Here's a possible answer: you might turn to politicians who make a show of disparaging facts, who liberate us from any appeal to an evidence-based future. Instead, you turn to what Tim Snyder has referred to as 'the politics of eternity', and Svetlana Boym as 'restorative nostalgia'.
9. If you are Putin, you get your media to promote a nostalgic vision of a restored Russian empire and start invading other countries to bring this about. If you are Trump, it involves making America great again. Turkish and Hungarian media promote similar phantoms, and with us in the UK it's about marching brightly into a future in which we have taken back control of something or other and restored old weights and measures.
10. Of course, there's nothing wrong with getting a bit nostalgic now and again. It only becomes dangerous when it entails the striving to recover a lost past in a manner that substitutes an unreflective emotivism for critical thinking, and the denial of an unpalatable future.
11. It is this type of nostalgia or 'politics of eternity' that is all that is left, and the last thing that is required by those who peddle these fabricated, chimerical pasts, are facts.
12. This is the brand of politics that has arguably taken hold in Moscow, in Budapest in Washington DC and now the UK. It's a distracting last gasp, one based very much on creating an 'Us' and 'Them' mentality, and that might even need shoring up with a bit more authoritarianism when it too starts to go sour. It is no surprise to me that it has summoned up all this discontent that is issuing in strike action.
Got to leave it there.
There's one last thing: I don't hold the views I describe above in any way rigidly. All I have tried to do is say what I think is going on right now and I could be wrong about a lot of this stuff.
