The politics of futility.

OBAMA, Barack, 1961-; TRUMP, Donald, 1946-; FRUSTRATION; CONSUMER behavior; POLITICAL participation; PRACTICAL politics; HUMAN rights movements; SUPERMARKETS

Here, she makes a distinction between "small p" politics - what might be described as micropolitical expressions that anticipate large-scale political action - and "big P" politics, which deals with analyses of power, governmentality, capitalism and the like. FEATURES On one of his many post-presidential speaking tours, Barack Obama told a 2017 summit on food innovation in Milan: 'People have a tendency to blame politicians when things don't work, but as I always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve.'1 He bemoaned the low voter turnout and leftist apathy that facilitated, he believed, the election of Donald Trump. That consumer choices may have a politics - fair trade, green, vegan, woman-owned - morphs into the sense that politics is nothing but consumer choices, that is, individuated responses to individuated needs.'19 When politics becomes "nothing but consumer choices" - a variation of the like-or-dislike binary - it becomes impossible to think of it as anything other than a variant of capitalist experience. This acceptance, Dean notes, 'enchains us to collective failure, turning us ever inward as it holds back the advance of a politics capable of abolishing the current system and producing another one'.20 The politics of babies Voting with your dollar and the practice of buycotting present two ways that the politics of futility operates in the early 21st century - principally that we can buy our way out of systemic social and ecological problems. [Extracted from the article]

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