(149) Grænn
As mentioned, Blairism is “wokeness” and you can trace a direct line from an early 1990s United Colours of Benetton ad—all the races of the world represented—to a late 2010s ad where there are no white models (or only trans white models) because that takes the logic of reparation to its completion; fairer than fair. In a sense, the worldview is total narcissism—total Blair and Trudeau—and it can be counterposed to “real” movements: Trump, Corbyn, anti-Iraq War, Countryside Alliance, anti-vaxx—and yet it is not totally unreal.
The reason for this to be so can be found in the dialectic I traced before. It starts with Thatcherism; it starts with the City, wired into the world economy with a Bloomberg terminal and governed by an individualistic post-class technocratic model—it’s grounded in expertise, not blood; it’s virtual—the trader in 1988 in Canary Wharf is virtual; he sits in what was once an old-fashioned industrial zone, yet now it’s all Pret a Manger and glass—it could be Dallas or Singapore, architecturally. Blairism represents the left’s counter-move to that situation, mediated through Eurocommunism and Gramsci: trade unions are out, heavy industry is dead—it’s a light-weight consumer economy where women undertake service-based labour, it’s not blue-collar proletarians anymore. So it’s “democratic consumerism”—individual like Thatcherism, yet concerned black women are represented in ads and single mothers can get SureStart support @ the LifeHub (24/7 fone-support and web-chat also available).
Nobody thinks Corbyn’s plans to nationalise the top 100 companies on the FTSE would make life better—and after Brexit there was no one to take charge; the people who govern the country, Blair-style technocrats, hate the idea and refused to implement it (they’re not Wellington). So, oddly, leftist woke-Blairism is realistic; it’s Corbynism and Brexit that are nostalgic larps—Blairism lives in virtual space, where everything is today; and it is totally narcissistic like a girl with Instagram—it’s not real real but, as with Thatcher, it’s virtually real.