Quo Vadis, Democrats?

[HVC]

Ask him about architecture, you'll feel better

[Tonitrus]

Sometimes a little Brutalism is alright...keeps things interesting. 

[Sheilbh]

Thanks for all that - very interesting. The "personalization of the party" thing seems very topical these days, across a number of different countries.

Yeah I think it's a thing especially in Europe - because the bar to entry is so much lower than the US (even in the UK - we've got FPTP but politics itself is pretty cheap and there's none of the legal challenges of getting on the ballot that exist in the US). It's not the only example or area where I kind of think the grim, grinning presiding genius of the age is Silvio Berlusconi

One thing I'd slightly flag and this is again where Melenchon is interesting is that his is a hybrid model. There aren't foral membership procedures or rolls, it's not a democratic party in any way we'd understand it but at the same time there's basically an online platform where you can with fellow supporters create or join a "groupe d'action" which is basically like a base camp for campaigning and political education. But there's also the "caravane populaire" which they do every summer (https://lafranceinsoumise.fr/caravanes-populaires-ete-2026/) - basically they set up a stall in a neighbourhood (working class neighbourhoods) try to present their program, listen to concerns, register voters, do stuff like helping with benefit applications - so it's canvassing and casework and (because France) an aperitif populaire to end the day. I think they initially focused on the banlieues but are now moving into rural areas too and even trying to set up proper HQs or permanent offices in, say, a tower block to help (and politicise) the residents. So in a way he's not creating the functions of mass membership party democracy but is maybe replacing some of the functions from the organisations that generated that (like mutual aid associations, unions, workers' educational associations etc)?

And that style of organising is very directly influenced by Latin American social movement/Bolivarian politics - huge inspiration to Corbyn too and something that people around Corbyn have always pushed as a model but that he could never quite make work (the institutional Labour Party preferred its traditional structures of constituency Labour Party meetings, socialist raffles, canvassing on a weekend etc). People around him would have wanted to follow Your Party but it chaos.

As an aside: it's classic Shelibh to end with a "his stuff about creolisation" as if that's some widely known thing   

Soz - it is really interesting and as I say I think it's from a very long, very specifically French conversation and discourse about race and multiculturalism, which I don't know well enough to describe - but that will not stop me. In particular I think it ultimately probably stems from thought emerging from Aime Cesaire's Negritude - and his politics where he challenged the Communist Party over thir assimilationist and metropolitan (in the imperial sense) attitude. (And it's not for nothing that I think Melenchon's best results are in Frances overseas departments and territories).

I'm probably going to butcher this because I'm analogising to great English writers on race on cultural studies (like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy). But I think the writing in France and England comes from Caribbean origin thinkers - and that's crucial as you basically have Europe as the site of the coloniser, Africa as the site of the oppressed and then the new world which is where those meet (with other cultural flows) - and it is in the new world that creolisation happens. Which isn't just a mixing of different cultures, but an unpredictibale mixing that generates something new. This in itself is a form of identity - an identity constituted through rupture, that is always unfinished and is, in effect, expressed by the becoming, as opposed to identitiies that are more essentialist or of the soil in a sense.

This is a constant theme in English and French language Caribbean literature. But then has been applied both to the world more generally and also to Europe specifically (and I think there's a "you were there and so we are here" element to it - having exported, often by force, its languages, ideologies, cultural traditions those are now returning in new forms to Europe and creating something new). I think that's roughly the theory and literary use of it - and then Melenchon is adapting it into politics, I think ultimately because it allows him to unify positions that are attacked as communitariant or Anglo-Saxon on multi-culturalism with his Jacobin, Republican heritage.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, we are all into that, aren't we? Sheilbh posts make me feel dumb as a doorknob.

The sad results of a crippling podcast habit

[Crazy_Ivan80]

But don't assume for a moment the melenchon is a friend of France though.

[Duque de Bragança]

Ask him about architecture, you'll feel better

Still waiting to read from Sheilbh about Mélenchon's vote-catching islamo-leftism.