Oxymoronism

Jeff Sparrow

"Since the nineties," says British Pakistani writer Tariq Ali, "democracy has, in the West, taken the form of an extreme center, in which center-left and center-right collude to preserve the status quo; a dictatorship of capital that has reduced political parties to the status of the living dead."

The "extreme centre" grew, he contends, out of the Thatcherite notion of TINA: the conviction that there is no alternative to the market. In a capitalist democracy, capitalism means serving the market, whose implacable dictates cannot be bucked.

Hence the inexorable rise of the technocrat: the slick professional charged with interpreting and placating the demands of the economy. Leaders of the extreme centre (whether conservative or social democratic) govern by wooing voters with empty rhetoric at election time - and then keep them out of the way as much as possible, so the professionals can get on with running the country."

_________________________________________________________

As usual Jeff Sparrow is profoundly cogent.

Extremism, even of the centre, is undesirable. Wisdom is everywhere, yet look at the state of the world - drowned out by the white noise of the media; occluded by the superficial oxymoronism of ideology.

By technocrat do we mean ideologue or better yet apparatchik, that now taboo term of the cold war era which somehow sort of rings true? What of the ivory tower syndrome; the plethora of fence-sitting, analysing, commentating, criticising people who possess the the depth of perception and intelligence to see through the white noise and oxymoronism exuded by the elites, yet do nothing about it?

It's all too hard. We're all too comfortable. And we didn't do it so why should we have to fix it.