What a time to be alive!
In the US, Trump is re-elected and in Europe, the governments are
collapsing (Germany), tethering at the edge of collapse (France), headed
towards a last ditch centrist coalition that nobody believes in
(Austria), or have already flipped to the far-right (Hungary, Slovakia,
Italy, Netherlands).
It's clear, the liberal world order has collapsed and will not recover.
Not only at the periphery, where it was always fragile and embroiled in
wars (hence the easy alignment of Harris and Cheney [1]), but also at
the center. At the periphery, which no longer accepts the status of
periphery had has become present in many forms in the center, few will
shed tears, except the Ukrainians and, possibly, the Taiwanese. The
pious bromides about human rights and a rules-based order cannot provide
justification and soft-power, with the genocide in Gaza the final nail
in the coffin.
At the center, the order collapsed because of its own contradictions.
Since there are many, they manifest themselves in different ways, but I
think they boil down to the neoliberal state being unable to manage the
two really deep transformations.
One is digitization, where market forces created extreme concentration
of wealth and power while threatening everyone else with redundancy
(most recently even artists, long presented as neoliberal role models).
It destroyed the public sphere (a problematic construct to begin with)
replacing it with a system of chaotic volatility.
The other is climate change, where the weakened state has been unable to
overcome the resistance of the fossil interests. Instead of strong
policies, "market incentives" were used, which made life under
stagnating wages even harder, while having no impact on the structural
dependencies. Hence, the clean energy built-out did not reduce the
amount of carbon emissions. That might change in the medium term, simply
for economic efficiency reasons, but likely too little, too late. All of
this made a mockery of expertise and rationality, which acknowledged the
problem while coming up with a long list of reasons why not to act on
it. Against this background, the argument that climate change is not a
big deal because we can fix it later once AI has delivered a miracle
solution, is that least internally consistent.
While Trump and the far right are, well, fascists in a political science
sense, their support is not because people became fascists (well, some
have always been, and it has become OK to say so openly). As Brian
Holmes as argued for a long time now, the popularity of the far right is
better seen a Polaynian double movement, people turning to fascism as a
way of seeking protection against the ravages of unconstrained
capitalism (trumps to main points, lower prices and closed borders).
It's quite striking that in six out of seven out of ten states, abortion
protection measures won with strong popular support. Even in Florida,
57% of voters backed the measure (but failed to reach the 60% threshold
required for adaption). it's quite telling that even asked in isolation,
the key point of Harris's campaign was widely supported, but the overall
project of the continuation of the liberal project was rejected.
The left has been completely unprepared for this collapse. 50 years of
neoliberalism has undermined ideas and practices of solidarity and
replaced it with a cynical, game-theory view of social interaction of
endless competition in zero-sum games. On what new basis solidarity
could be rebuilt, is entirely unclear to me.
We are off the charts now and many vulnerable people will suffer. There
is a tidal wave of ugliness coming. While liberal wars might be pursued
less vigorously now that the Cheneys are in the wilderness for good,
neocolonial exploitation will not, creating its own incentives for war.
Musk made this very clear in relation to the need to have access to
cheap lithium.
But, there is no reason to be nostalgic. It's precise the charts we had
that created the mess we are will.
[1] For a fuller view of the background of this alignment, see the
recent discussion of John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvFtyDy_Bt0)
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