London & Stuff

Go here and watch the Guardian's video coverage of the recent march to protest against government cuts to public services. More than 250,000 people took part in the march. The Guardian always provides great video coverage of events like this, but unfortunately you can't embed them, so I haven't posted them here before.

More and more, it seems to me that liberals' ineptitude and/or compliance with conservative factions of government is going to be what causes the ultimate downfall of the crumbling paradigm of neoliberalism. Clearly, the time in which neoconservatives had any sort of credibility with moderately competent minds saw it's definitive end in the last Bush administration. Thus, you now see conservative parties embracing idiocy, nationalistic fervor, and fantasy. This is a desperate act that history tells us is unsustainable, and an indicator of imminent demise (as if we needed another one).

Absent a contingent of liberals who non-elites can suitably delude themselves are working in their interest, when the idiots and tyrants are clearly running the show, is when the system becomes untenable. This is clearly the case now. When a government becomes openly combative with its workers in the face of failings of their own making, failings that directly and adversely effect the lives of the majority of their constituents, this is the time when people rise up and say, "Enough." This is what we are seeing all over the world.

This isn't like anti-war demonstrations, which many governments actually encourage. These are unorganized, massive demonstrations of total dissent. We are increasingly seeing people wise up and say out with the lot of you, whose complaints are directed at the system and those who enable it. Zizek's favorite Mao quote looks more and more fitting to the current moment in history. Maybe the lie has become so egregious that its defense is increasingly impossible, maybe this recent crop of liberals is just more brazenly corporatist than those before, or maybe they just badly misjudged the amount of abuse that their constituents would be willing to suffer. In any case, it's impossible to follow the current events like this most recent one in London (and even the disenchantment that caused most non-Republican voters to decide that voting wasn't worth their time, since neither party represented their interests, in the US in 2010) and not conclude that we are watching the beginning of a paradigm shift in Western political life.