I don’t understand Americans’ love affair with JFK. He was left-wing and vulgar. He and his terrible wife made vulgarity the norm not only in politics but in society. He died tragically but isn’t it time to move on? No victim status should last that long.
I do recognize, however, that since I wasn’t born here, it’s normal that I don’t understand the attraction of the Kennedy mystique. I do, however, understand the nation-state and the only existing alternative.
The recent release of the JFK files revealed absolutely nothing new, as was to be expected. But the perennially excitable online personalities immediately concluded that “the CIA killed JFK” which nothing in the released papers indicates.
The CIA is only possible and necessary in the world of nation-states. It’s not needed when there are no nations and we have, instead, an undifferentiated space of flows where liquid capital moves at lightning speed. “Defund the police / FBI / CIA / the national military” is a neoliberal dream. We are parroting neoliberal slogans — be they left or right-wing — because we’ve been infected with neoliberal mentality.
The nation-state is the only model of statehood that legitimizes itself through the consensus of the governed. It was born with the words “we, the people”, and that was a revolutionary idea in the 18th century. The post-national neoliberal state doesn’t seek the consent of the governed. It acts on behalf of the oligarchy. We can see it in big things and small. At my university, the neoliberal leadership decided to destroy physics without caring in the least that neither students nor faculty want to get rid of physics. We used to have academic self-governance, and it’s now gone. Decisions are made by a small group of people who act on principles that are alien and incomprehensible to the plebs they rule.
The nation-state gives a lot. A high standard of living for the majority. A large middle class. Rights. Welfare in the broadest sense. Good things that we all enjoy. But it asks for something equally big in return. We need to be “we, the people.” Not a raging maw of individual need but a group that perceives itself as such. The Chair of Physics acted as a perfect neoliberal subject when he said “close other departments before mine.” As a result, he didn’t save physics. He made sure that we all get picked away one after another. The hyper-competitive “me, me, me” mentality feels good but has terrible results for almost everybody except a small bunch of the very malleable and exceptionally lucky.
The CIA, the police, and the nation-state (which is the mother of them both) are wildly imperfect. When I speak in defense of the nation-state, people begin to list its catastrophes and imperfections at me as if I were unaware of them. I am very aware, though. The problem is, that the neoliberal post-national state has all of the same catastrophic imperfections without any of the good stuff. The only thing it offers is that it flatters our inner hubristic ego maniac. And we are sacrificing the standard of living, the safety in the streets, the good roads, the vast middle class, the chance to study physics at a cheap state school, and our good life as “we, the people” to the narcotic pleasure of this ego stoking. We are turning away from the nation-state, robbing it of any need to exist.
My conservatism is entirely dedicated to the idea that we need to stop our death march towards the shiny new thing of neoliberal post-nation state and consider everything we are discarding in the process. Neoliberalism makes even family a class-based privilege that increasingly fewer people can have. It destroys the possibility of being at peace with our bodies, our past, and our culture. It puts us against each other in a battle for constantly dwindling resources without giving us a chance to wonder why they are constantly dwindling.
We need to stop wailing and wanting. We need to stand still for a bit and get a hold of ourselves. We are destroying something very imperfect for something much, much worse. There is no narrative that actually defends neoliberalism. Nobody has come up with an idea for why it’s good because there is no such narrative. This is something that simply can’t be defended. It seduces us by never even trying to argue its case. And we’ve accepted that like the weakest, most manipulable of pawns.
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