Felix wrote: 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.
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Yes well said, there's been a collapse. In a recent article, Rafael Behr
described a fault-line running through “what used to be definable as the
singular “west” in terms of a contest between “liberal
constitutionalists and nationalist crusaders.” The former” he argued
“defend a 20th-century legacy of multilateral treaties, respect for
democratic protocol and the rule of law. The latter style themselves as
warriors in an existential, civilisational struggle against moral decay
through “wokeism” and cultural dissolution in an immigrant horde.”
If we take Behr’s picture at face value, then yes the largest tent pole
of liberal constitutionalism, the USA, just collapsed leaving the
remaining constitutionalists as outliers blindly scrabbling and flailing
under the flattened tent with no idea “on what basis solidarity can be
re-built”.
From this perspective we must ask if this is the moment to simply
abandon liberal constitutionalism? Is it a busted flush? Are
“enlightenment rationalist values, including “the rule of law”, “human
rights” and the “public sphere” itself, mere “bromides”? Or can national
and international solidarity ONLY be re-built on some version of a
global constitutional order? Yes its deeply flawed. But as a point of
departure amidst the ruble, when all’s said and done, what else actually
is there?
Let me point to a hyper-local positive micro-example from my own neck of
the woods on how “re-building solidarity" might begin. This week the
UK’s deputy Labour Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, signalled that
restrictions will be placed on Britain’s long standing “right to buy
scheme” on any new social housing currently being built. The possibility
that tenants in social housing should have the right to buy their home
has for many decades been core tenet of Thatcher era neo-liberalism and
had the effect of progressively depleting the stock of affordable public
housing.
This is a small but non-trivial example because it instigates a
materially consequential challenge to the core neo-liberal aspiration of
a “property owning democracy”. That was part of a wider policy of
undermining the public sphere from transport to culture and the
privatisation of basic amenities. OK its only one of many tiny examples.
And in the face of Trumpian victory its nothing. But still it shows how
constitutionalist socialism can still challenge and reverse the policies
of reactionary nationalist crusaders.
Re-establishing a shared reality begins with demonstrating the value of
the public sphere in the widest sense of the word. Its where we start to
re-build new coalitions of pragmatic resistance piece by piece, based on
a key communitarian principal of "belonging not othering".
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