Performative Axisship, Part III

Part I
Part II
Part IV

But way down south in the land of cotton, the phrase "law and order" was bandied about as a polite way to say "white supremacy, and lynch every n----- and n-----lover who stands in our way." "Law and order" meant supporting the troops - no, not the Yankees and their army, but the real troops, the cops who crossdressed as ghosts after hours. "Law and order" was law and order by the white man, for the white man, and of the white man.

Most people don't consider police riots in Selma to be either lawful or orderly. But the dogs down south heard the whistle plain as day, and gave Nixon two terms. They saw Reagan forced by the shitlibs to designate a "Black History Month" in the name of hoping that their performative allyship would make racism go away forever, and they saw him choose February because it was the shortest, and they heard the whistle.

It's worth pointing out, however, that this was all just performative axisship. The conservatives didn't go further than snarling at black people with plausible deniability. More Republicans than Democrats backed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; it was the southern Democrats resisting their own martyred President's bill and hoisting the Treason Rag above state capitols.

Furthermore, the conservative Republicans weren't the only ones dabbling in axisship. Hillary Clinton got in on the act by calling black kids "superpredators," and Joe Biden recently implied that all black kids were poor. But I don't call their axisship performative, because Uncle Touchy wrote the damn crime bill, and Yasskween Hilldawg voted for it. Hell, even Uncle Touchy's good friend Bernie voted for it, like the useless free shit bootlicker he is. Yasskween's sexual superpredator husband also passed "welfare reform," which is what a middle finger to the black working class looks like when translated into English.

Ostensibly, the shitlibs were doing this to "triangulate" between the supposed better angels of their liberal nature, and all the conservative Problematics in the electorate. But the trouble with this is that the conservatives under Nixon and Reagan pioneered this tactic of triangulation with their dogwhistles in the first place. The Southern Democrats under Nixon got less than nothing of substance under Nixon. They had to eat a new welfare program intended primarily for inner city blacks called WIC, because the Black Panthers were making gains among black workers by providing the welfare state themselves and Nixon was too staunch a Cold Warrior to let that stand, domestic racism be damned. But Nixon was a private racist, and his triangulation made private racism respectable again, and those psychic victories were enough to win Nixon the loyalty of dumbass middle class racists down south. The only way that the shitlibs could ever possibly win those voters back was to outbid the GOP's performative axisship with actual axisship, hence the crime bill and welfare reform.

Or take the racial politics of the Obama-Trump era. Obama performed allyship by starting to ban private prisons, knowing full well how reversible it would be for Hillary, or maybe Jeb. He didn't want to really ban them, he just wanted to shore up the left flank of the Dymocrites ahead of an election. That his party lost. Bigly. To a guy calling Mexicans rapists and promising to build a wall and make them pay for it. How'd that hopey-changey stuff work out for ya, Obama?

However, the sound and fury of Trump's culture war signified… nothing. There is no border wall, but I did build a couple walls in my agricultural collective in the American Southwest and make Donald Trump pay for it. Trump's ICE Gestapo tactics have scared the undocumented Hispanic community into organizing a more effective resistance, and the God-President has still not thrown as many undocumented Hispanics out as Obama. Trump's political need to find a couple black friends to de-racist himself for the suburbs caused him to befriend and listen to Kanye West and Tim Scott, and a halting halfway criminal justice reform bill followed. It's not full communism tomorrow or anything, but it's far more than Team Obama would have ever allowed to come to pass in the end.

So the liberal Dymocrites perform allyship to win over the middle class left but practice axisship to preserve their bourgeois class interests, and the conservative Republicans perform axisship to win over the middle class right but practice at least some allyship to preserve their working class interests.

Actual axisship plays into the hands of the liberals, by dividing the workers along any other axis than class. Race, faith, sexuality, literally whatever middle class fusspots get grumpy about is actual axisship. Moreover, actual axisship does not have to look like axisship. Making equality look like something functionally oppressive and for gender studies majors is actual axisship, done by people performing allyship. Or to put it another way, taking the "left" (really, the liberal) side of the culture wars is axisship because you're still elevating the culture war above the class war. Or to put it yet another way, all forms of identity politics are actual axisship.

So we can learn something from the conservatives and their dogwhistles. Being willing to blow a dogwhistle gets you the votes of the uneducated middle class, people too dumb, selfish, and hateful to realize that you haven't actually given them anything. The conservatives dogwhistled, but didn't give them anything in order to maximize their appeal outside of the South. We could easily dogwhistle and not give them anything because, y'know, racism is fucking abhorrent, and the Republican coalition would look much the same as it does now.

Should we even want to perform axisship, though? The answer is provided by Lenin: anything that obstructs or delays the revolution is our enemy. Therefore, anything that advances or hastens the revolution is our friend. If by performing axisship we can hasten the revolution, then we should.

We would not be the first socialists to do so. Lenin wrote a book called Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which got him cancelled all the way to assuming state power.

Stalin literally signed a treaty with Hitler, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which went so far as even shipping the Third Reich resources to fight on. It was material aid to fascists, but it was performative axisship in the end. With that pact, Stalin bought time to re-arm and industrialize, he forced the liberal West to finally declare war on Hitler, he got Hitler to do his dirty work against the Polish officer class, and in every way outsmarted him and strengthened socialism against its obvious coming confrontation with fascism. The various liberal pacts with Hitler had given him half of Europe in exchange for bupkis, so if Stalin was really pursuing a "red-brown alliance" here, he was doing it with a lot more anti-fascist intent than his contemporaries.

And of course, Abraham Lincoln, though not a comrade, did nonetheless lead leftist forces into literal battle here. He had to get elected to do so, and a despicable though earnestly-held and common belief of his that helped him do it was that he originally wanted to send all the freed slaves back to Africa. Even had he not believed that, it would still have been wise of him to campaign as if he did. In the end, the necessities of civil war and the pleadings of Frederick Douglass changed his mind, and he enlisted them and made citizens and jurors of them instead. His axisship ended up being performative, but it was a necessary position for him to publicly hold in order to be in a position to betray it as President at all. Even the North was incredibly racist at the time, and his abolitionist tendencies were already at the edge of white supremacist electability as it was. Having the "send-them-back-to-Africa" trope in his corner to reassure nervous whites was the most repugnant correct line I'm aware of. If I had to go back in time and replace Lincoln, I'd run on that too, but with no intention whatsoever of delivering on it once elected.

On to the conclusion, Part IV