The Resumption of History

Mike Pence—Mike Pence!—the utter mediocrity plucked from a dead-end political career in Indiana who probably couldn’t name three signers of the Constitution if there were a free corn dog in it for him; whose loyalty to Trump led him to dutifully allow his boss humiliate him in new ways each week of his term as Vice President; that Mike Pence could not bring himself to sign off on the farcical plot abstain from his constitutional duty to certify the election results. This notorious moral coward was more scared of being busted for violating the Constitution than he was of Donald Trump and his mob of latter-day brownshirts!.

I don’t think that this was a near miss. I think it was, rather, the tip of an iceberg. If this idiotic coup had gone further, then in order for Trump to remain in power many of the 2.1 million civilian federal workers and 1.2 million military personnel employed by the US government would have had to take actions in support of the coup that would have made those individuals feel physically nauseated. I believe that Trump would likely have been rejected by the government in a manner analogous to an organism’s immune response rejecting a foreign organ transplant. I feel sure that the sheer outrageous Soviet-style obscenity of self-appointed “alternate” elector slates arriving to nullify the votes of millions of citizens according to John Eastman’s demented plan would have triggered an insurrection inside the Federal Government, with officials at Justice, Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security etc. actively rebelling, to the point that in the end the whatever nominal power Trump retained, the joystick would have gone slack in his hands. I’m deep in counterfactual territory here, but I don’t think it is too far-fetched to imagine that the Secret Service might actually have taken him into custody, if only to escort him to Mar-a-Lago.

That is our secret sauce. This country indoctrinated itself into the values of rule of law, writ large, for over two centuries, to the point that those values became a cultural norm. We are still, demonstrably, as of January 2021, a people that will brook no compromise concerning the ultimate rules that our rulers must submit to. Would you like something to be proud of, as an American? Forget about our economic leadership, or our technological primacy. Be proud of that.

Let me finally spell out the point of this extended rumination. When I allude to “The Ideology of the Enlightenment” in this essay, what I mean is not only the notion that it is useless to design a system of governance to deliver Justice unless the exercise of Power by that system has been carefully and mindfully circumscribed. I also mean that it is absolutely essential to have clear messaging about the importance of the problems of Power; that one must propagandize the aspect of Power limitation in governance—such as freedom of political speech, or of the circumscribing of official, judicial, police, and prosecutorial authority—and the crucial role that it plays in a strong, successful democracy; that one must socialize one’s citizens into the values of Power limitation as a critical means of inoculating one’s democracy against tyrants. It is dangerous for us to ever forget this.

Note that this is also, and not inconsequentially, a discussion of freedom. But not “freedom” in the sense of the word as it is shouted by the kind of entitled idiot “patriots” who like to wave “We’re Number 1” Foam Fingers while presumptuously helping themselves to an individual’s license to do anything they like at anybody else’s expense. This is “freedom” in the sense of preserving our liberties as citizens to choose our government, and limiting the corruption that could destroy those liberties. This is a discussion about the freedom that’s worth having, worth protecting, and worth talking about without shame. The freedom that makes the country worth defending in the first place.

It is also a discussion about corruption. There is an unusual feature of Western, and particularly US institutions compared to those characteristic of the rest of the world. The level of corruption of all kinds in those institutions—in Central Banks, in Courts, in Government Departments, as well as in private institutions—while not zero, is so much lower than in the rest of the world that the fact is frequently remarked upon by visitors from developing nations—I have met a few who never even found the routine corrupt practices in their home countries noteworthy in the slightest until they came to the US and suddenly didn’t have to bribe anyone. This relative lack of institutional corruption is a phenomenon that is clearly related to the same set Enlightenment values: corruption doesn’t check itself, it is checked when institutions designed to limit it are set up in a culture that expects it to be limited. This feature of our society is, I believe, one of our most important sources of soft power. Most of the world dwells in such extensive and endemic corruption that the idea of living without it can seem more utopic than the idea of “freedom”, believe it or not.

At the moment we, in the US, still appear to have some immunity to tyranny, some attachment to our lawful institutions of government, and some allergy to corruption. We do not do these things perfectly. For example, our attachment to a “Unitary Executive” as a legal concept is an abomination that needs to be sent to some kind of graveyard as quickly as can be arranged, before executive power becomes unbounded. Also, we allow our police and prosecutors far too much power. I still believe that we grant the FBI and the FISA court too much deference, in the name of fighting Terrorism. Nonetheless, the needle does seem to be moving on even these issues lately. There are some grounds for optimism.

We could lose those things, though. We have become confused about what we’re about in recent decades, and it shows in what our youth thinks of us. I’ve had some conversations with twenty-somethings lately that have left me very concerned, because of the latent bothsidist/whataboutist attitudes underlying such phrases as “to my generation” that precede some observations of near-complete detachment and cynicism. Well, honestly. Who can blame them? We transmitted to them an idea of our values based on the neo-liberalism that we learned from Reagan and Thatcher. I’d be cynical too.

On the other hand, perhaps we may now live in a time when it is possible to refocus on what matters.

Tomorrow: Awakenings

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

The intangible benefits raise problems of mutual obligation within society that I will not address here, not because they are uninteresting, but because for reasons that will become clear below, the tangible benefits are the ones that concern us here. Those benefits raise the following problem: society created the wealth, but society is a construct. How are individuals to benefit? Who, exactly are the stakeholders of society, who are entitled to a payout, and in what measure? The natural process of wealth creation will not land the wealth in the laps of the designated stakeholders, whoever they may be, nor in the designated amounts. How is that wealth to be collected and redistributed? What part is to be used for the common good, and in what way?

These questions have been answered in many ways over time and geography. Stakeholders have been those who held monopolies over edged weapons, or white men, or bourgeoisies, or proletariats, or mandarins, or members of ethnic groups, or everyone born on a territory over some age, and so on. Fiscal systems have included contract tax-farming, various aristocratic hierarchies, clerical tithing networks, the IRS. And so on. Much of this was not really well-thought out, or thought out at all, really. Until Marx.

Karl Marx furnished the first modern, systematic theory of Justice, in the sense above. Which makes sense, because as I’ve set it out, “Justice”—at least the part of Justice having to to with the tangible benefits of living in society—is really a materialist resource allocation problem. And Marx was, before everything else, a materialist philosopher. He wove together economic theory and historical narrative in such a powerful combination that nowadays even scholars who violently dissent from Marxist views would never dare sever the link that he forged. He hammered home the fertile cross-pollination of economic and historical thinking, and singled out the importance of the social class as a key tool of socio-historical analysis, one of his many durable contributions. Marx is one of those rare writers, like Aristotle or Freud, whose work is so powerful that they can be wrong on many, even most details, while the systems of thought that they create condition the work of scholars, and even change the habits of mind of entire societies, for centuries after their deaths.

If you happen to think as I do, Marx is still conditioning your thoughts today on the proper stakeholders in society—to the extent that we feel that capital and income is not the same as human worth—and on how wealth should be collected and redistributed—by taxation rates that do not respect self-important and self-serving assertions of the societal good inherent in conspicuous consumption and accumulation. Thinking that way does not make one a Marxist: it merely acknowledges the important and positive ways in which the world that we live in is still shaped by Marx’s thought.

The Problem of Power

The trouble with Marx is that he was utterly uninterested in the other key problem of governance, the Problem of Power. Which is this: Suppose that you have created institutions of government designed to carry out your design of Justice. You must now animate those institutions by installing officials, whom you must invest with functions and mandates. And you must entrust them with the power of government to carry out those mandates. At which point you will immediately run into the most immutable, best-known, iron law of politics: power corrupts. It doesn’t matter how you choose or train your officials, they will be tempted to abuse their power every day, and, inevitably, some of them will.

“Corruption” here does not mean merely or only pecuniary corruption. A government official may refuse to take even a penny in wrongful compensation, but if that official should improperly shield a family member from a judicial process (say), that is corruption, and it is the type of institutional rot which, if unchecked, can spread and destroy any scheme of Justice ever devised. In order to ensure that this does not happen, the institutions of government need to be somehow designed to prevent this kind of corruption from occurring by limiting the authority of officials, even if doing so means that the ability to provide Justice is impaired.

That is the paradox and tragedy of governance: the problems of Justice and Power are in tension with each other. Without limitations of authority designed to prevent corruption, institutions of Justice soon rot. But if those limitations are too effective, Justice will be hamstrung.

People who care deeply about Justice frequently chafe at those restrictions, often (in my view) without acknowledging the importance of their function. For example, the right to “Freedom of Speech”, which enables so much enraging speech that many would prefer to see suppressed, is a restriction on Power: it prevents government from deciding what political statements people may or may not make. Weakening that restriction could have dreadful consequences for all speech, irrespective of what awful political speech it permits now.

Another example of a problem of Power has to do with the “Rule of Law”. That phrase is vague, and covers a lot of ground, but in my opinion the most important claim under its aegis is the total and uncompromising requirement that our rulers be themselves bound by laws that they cannot change or evade as it suits them. Obviously this is a problem of Power—in fact, it is the principal Problem of Power.

The framework of Justice and Power allows us to make a key observation: the Problems of Power are prior to the Problems of Justice, in the sense that it is a higher priority to resolve Power-related issues than Justice-related issues. This is an assertion that is likely to raise immediate objections in some quarters, but it is easy to defend. If institutional corruption is limited—if solutions to Problems of Power are addressed at the institutional level—then the possibility exists to provide a durable design of Justice. If institutional corruption is not limited, no such possibility exists.

Note also how this framework allows us to analyze that slippery phrase, the “Free Market”, that I alluded to in Part I: used in its non-technical, ideological sense, the phrase is a compound of terms pertaining to Power (“Free” as in free of overbearing goverment regulation) and Justice (“Market”, a choice of resource allocation algorithm), which uses rhetorical legerdemain to press into service the priority of the former in order to justify a particular family of distributional schemes belonging to the latter. Neat trick, eh?

As I said, Marx had no interest whatever in problems of Power. As near as I can tell there was still widespread belief in an idea of human perfectibility associated with faith in the possibilities of science when Das Kapital was written that may have made it easy to ignore the problem of human corruption. The intellectual toxins of Romanticism had not quite set in by that point. And, of course, if the State withers away, I suppose there is less of a concern about corruptibility of leaders. Consequently, Marxism is, taken as a theory of governance, at best half a theory.

None of the intellectual ankle-biters who followed Marx appeared to even notice that there was a gap to be filled here, least of all the opportunistic pseudo-philosopher polemicists who led the Russian Revolution. Their Theory of Power was Vanguardism: an elite, educated in “Revolutionary Consciousness” would furnish a “Vanguard of the Revolution” that would safeguard the interests of Marxist(-Leninist) Justice. To even call this scheme a “theory” is to endow it with too much dignity. It was word salad covering preparations for a politics of violent coercion.

I believe that this disinterest in the Problem of Power—the wilful inability to even understand that a problem exists—is the feature to which we can trace the depressingly unfailing habit of purely Marxist governance projects to collapse, over and over again, in savage orgies of violence directed against the proletariat (or agrarian class) that they nominally exist to defend, while officials enthusiastically knife each other in the back, before eventually settling into an equilibrium state of self-dealing, corrupt bureaucracy at the expense of the nations that they govern. I cannot think of a single exception to this rule. And it’s been 105 years since the Russian Revolution.

So we cannot look to Marx for usable thinking about Power. For that, we must turn instead to the “bourgeois” political philosophers of the American Revolution.

Tomorrow: The Sources of American Soft Power

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

An imbecilic war of choice by the US destabilized the Middle East by wiping out a Westernizing Arab Nationalist movement over 40 years in the making. In this context, “The West” has a longer-term historical sense than its 20th Century meaning: it is the cultural ecumene that succeeded “Christendom”, and is viewed by Islamists as such. In this sense Saddam Hussein was our (i.e. Westernizing) dickhead, as was Qaddafi, as were Assad pere, Sadat, Nasser, Arafat, et alia. They may have been Marxists, but Marx was, after all, a Western philosopher in the same sense. All of them looked back for inspiration to Kemal Ataturk, the pioneering Westernizing nationalist Turkish reformer (the destruction of whose modernizing works is the life project of Recep Erdogan, who has more than one iron in the fire in this narrative).

This is not hindsight: any half-lettered day laborer in the Sudan could have told you in 2002 that Sadam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden loathed each other far more viscerally than either despised George Bush, but apparently this fact passed beneath the notice of the US National Security Council. When the George W. Bush declared war on “evil” characters such as Hussein using language straight out of a Justice League comic-book morality tale, the effect was merely to discredit and destroy Arab nationalism, leaving the field open to medieval-minded Islamist dead-enders, the only remaining viable region-wide political alternative in the Middle East. This effectively turned the region into an roiling, uncontrollable, political seismic zone. It was the ultimate geopolitical own-goal.

A financial crisis straight out of 1929 wiped tens of trillions of dollars of small-investor wealth off the books all over the world, although oddly the people intermediating those transactions did OK. Weird new global pandemics, spread by frenetic new global travel patterns before COVID-19 (Avian flu, Ebola, Swine Flu, SARS-CoV-1) suddenly stalked the world. New, really new, weird, really weird weather, made large parts of the densely-inhabited world much harder to live in. And drove more desperate people to emigration, to competition, and to more conflict. Southern hemisphere nations that could not act as magnets for global outflows of jobs acted instead as sources for global inflows of migrants heading for the Northern hemishpere, where they were distinctly unwelcome.

Western Europe, long accustomed to scolding the US for its history of racial prejudice when such reproofs merely took the form of celebrating African-American cultural and political icons, suddenly discovered an ethnic and racial mean streak of its own, as it found itself struggling to assimilate hundreds of thousands, then millions of North African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing war zones, famines, or simply poverty too abject to credit. The “choice” between being forced to see those people sleeping on streets and in train stations or sinking their teeming cockleshell boats at sea produced some of the ugliest political discourse I ever hope to hear in my lifetime.

All of this by way of saying, for many, many people, life was not only not getting more comfortable, it was getting weirder, more alarming, more anxious.

And that, I think, is the common thread. Anxiety. People, all over the world, saw a lot of change that they didn’t have any control over, that they didn’t like, that in many cases ran right over them, and that they wanted stopped and reversed, somehow. And their leaders, in most cases, were feeding them bullshit happy-talk about about how everything was getting better.

Well, this is the kind of political tinder that evokes demagogues. It’s not possible to even be a normal politician when people get this angry and scared. And if you are the kind of politician who knows how to surf this kind of sentiment, it is child’s play to turn fear into anger, anger into hate, and hate into power. Like flies drawn to excrement, those demagogues showed up for work and promptly ate the lunches of the politicians who should have been carrying the neo-liberal gospel to further triumphs.

In the US, the dynamic began manifesting itself with the accelerating growth of wealth and income inequality, documented brilliantly by Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, further spurred by the inevitable, but utterly mismanaged economic dislocations driven by globalizing outflows of jobs—not discussed in polite company at Davos—compounded by the happy-talk of the elite celebrating trade deals such as NAFTA that were obviously—obviously—immediately immiserating to millions who saw middle-class status slipping away. And, of course, the inflow of migrants from the South, always a constant flow in the US, was growing, circumventing legal immigration limits, often enough facilitated by traffickers in ways that allowed it to be coupled in the public mind with crime, in addition to (less logically, but understandably) those disappearing jobs.

Following which, we have a couple of market panics driven by inscrutable forces, the 9/11 clusterfuck, and the 2009 financial crisis.

In parallel, populist spoilers on the right (Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot) and on the left (Ralph Nader) played as a chorus to Newt Gingrich’s nihilistic “bomb-throwing” republicanism, displacing Jack Kemp/Bob Dole “Intellectual” (really!) Republicanism as the template for the Republican demagoguery to follow: The Karl Rovian Imagineering, the Fox Empire enablers, and the PAC-men billionaires. All acting in cynical, demagogic, anxiety-manipulating maneuvering schemes to gain and maintain power.

It would actually be funny, if it weren’t so deeply tragic: Imagine the silly looks on the faces of all those entitled rich guys who thought they were in control of the GOP, and running it as a finely-tuned engine for stoking rube-rage and converting it into power and wealth, when it suddenly dawned on them that Trump and his army of trailer-park yahoos had them all naked, spread-eagled, and tied to a barrel, as he took control of the party that they had primed for him by whipping up all that hate, simply because he realized before anyone else that you don’t need a dog whistle if you’re prepared to bellow all the ugly parts at the top of your lungs. Kind of like those German oligarchs in the 1932 election, who thought those ridiculous idiotic Nazi street brawlers were useful, but not serious, and anyway they were under control.

I realize how schematic the above account is. I know that it leaves out the America’s shabby treatment of Blacks and the concomitant manipulation of racism, and also gives no account of the Religious Right, the culture wars, the Paranoid Style in American Politics, and other factors that are dispiritingly constant factors in US social history going back to the age of Andrew Jackson, if not earlier.

My point is that in prosperous times the toxic effects of those pathologies of American politics are containable. In anxious times they are decidedly not.

So that’s where we stood, in the United States. By 2016, it had come to Trump. To the extent that the US had ever upheld ideals that the rest of the world aspired to emulate, it was beginning to appear that those ideals, whatever they were, were destined for a trip through the shredder. The US had just elected President a figure that the rest of the world would have no trouble recognizing as an oligarch.

And then, to add insult to injury, our own kids (who, just as we did as adolescents, thought that history began on the day they started paying attention to news) blamed us for screwing up the world because we were “capitalists”, and because “free enterprise is stupid” (or “racist”, or “transphobic”, or whatever) and because “capitalism is destroying the environment”.

And how do you even retrieve a political discussion that’s so hopelessly confused? How did we allow it to get so muddled? Why did we allow ourselves to be intellectually cornered into defending capitalism, as if that was the point, as if free enterprise were the aspect of our societies that, if someone were to place limits on it, we would say “no, sorry, now our societies are not worth defending after all”? What the hell happened to our actual political values?

Tomorrow: Of Justice and Power

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History

At the time—actually, a couple of years earlier—a young scholar named Francis Fukuyama published an essay, later expanded into a book, called The End of History, which argued that the impending global triumph of liberalism would remove the drivers of historical development (this summary does not do justice to Fukuyama’s argument), leading to a new era in human development. The argument was greeted with a mixture of celebration for its foresight in predicting the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and mockery for its oversimplifications. And of course, today it is apparent that its predictions were simply wrong. But all of this is quite unfair to Fukuyama, who was one of the very few people who not only noticed at the time that big changes were in the wind, but was also actually trying to make a structural effort to peer into the future. Getting it right in 1989 would have required superhuman clairvoyance. Perhaps the lesson to learn from The End of History is that at such moments, merely identifying the correct intellectual tools to use, and the right trends to watch, might be more modest and achievable goals than actually attempting to scry the future.

That’s what I’d like to attempt here, at any rate. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years mulling over various versions of the “how the hell did we get here” question. The last two months have been very clarifying of a number of issues for me, and helped me unify a number of rather scattered threads. I’d like to try to tell a coherent story of our relatively recent past as a means of sorting out some issues of political philosophy that in my opinion we, in the West, have allowed to become entangled, confused, and corrupted, to the point that we nearly forgot how to believe in the ideals that make us “The West” as something other than a geographical descriptor.

With that accomplished, I’d like to do some accounting of the elements at our disposal for understanding the world described by the scroll still shooting out of that slot.

The result will be a work of synthesis, bringing together a bit of history with some political philosophy in a very informal way, in an attempt to form a basic coherent picture. Such pictures are always wrong, in some sense, because they oversimplify. But they can be useful nonetheless as crude guidance. I doubt that we could expect much better tools for understanding the present, much less the future, from a much more refined treatment.

Even so, I’m not entirely sure I can pull this off. Someone ought to try, though.

Why Did The West ‘Win’ The Cold War?

I want to establish a premise: when asking a question like “Why did the West win the Cold War”, I am not inviting a full-up academic debate on this vast, nuanced, textured, difficult, potentially-hard-to-even-articulate-properly question; nor am I extending an invitation to the run-of-the-mill morality-play types of explanations that frequently devolve into NFL-style sack-dances. I don’t have the space in this type of essay for the former, or the patience for the latter. So I will simply state a view that I believe ought not be controversial. The West prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War in virtue of two logically distinct advantages:

• The tangible economic advantage: Western capitalism was organised in a manner that was unarguably more efficient than the Soviet command economy. Even though the latter was, in fact, a war-mobilization economy for almost its entire 74-year history, and hence capable of generating terrifying combat power, its actual economic power was disproportionately small and immiserating to the people imprisoned in its system. In the end, the competition did not turn out to be primarily military. To the extent that the competition showcased economic success, the Soviet bloc started behind, and only fell farther back as technological progress accelerated.
• The intangible ideological advantages: There were aspects of the respective politics of the two blocs that held different attractions to different people. I am going to return to these in some detail later, because I feel that it is important to disentangle some of the confused political discussion that later issued from that era. For now I just want to state that by the late ’80s, it was clear that the justice politics of Marxism-Leninism were quite discredited, whereas there was still credibility to the Enlightenment ideology animating the Western politics of liberty. Basically, “Freedom”. Really, I know how oversimplified this reads. I promise, we’ll get back to this, because it’s important.

I’m sorry if this seem kind of obvious, but my point is that these two apparently innocent, distinct philosophical threads became entangled in damaging, even toxic ways. Have you ever noticed the sleight of hand that occurs in phrases such as “The Free Market”? The word “Free” does two distinct jobs in that phrase: in the technical sense of the phrase (as a neutral, resource allocation algorithm) the word “free” describes the agility of agents in a market to meet each other collectively so as to establish efficient market equilibria; but in the ideological sense it means something very different: it acts as ideological evidence for the validity of what ought to be a value-neutral technical argument. In one implicit portmanteau phrase, we have a conflation of the tangible and intangible “weapons” that “won” the Cold War. Likewise for “Free Trade”, “Free Enterprise”, and so on. Conservative ideologues routinely use that bit of wordplay to cordon off commerce from taxation and government regulation. What sort of pervert would want to tax or regulate freedom, after all?

Of course, by the 1980’s with the advent of Ronald Reagan in the US, and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, it was perfectly clear that the erosion of the philosophical distinction between liberty and capitalism was the way of the future, and that the two were destined for fusion into a “neo-liberalism” whose character principally emphasized inviolable international trade relations and national fiscal and budget policies favoring business development, rather than national democratic arrangements.

Well, as the saying goes, you can’t argue with success. In 1991 the Soviet Union, against almost everyone’s expectations, fell down without triggering nuclear armageddon. The new neo-liberal order had won.

The Davos Consensus

Another reason one could argue the West “won” is that at the beginning of the Cold War the challenge presented to the West by the Soviet Union was met by US policymakers through the creation of an international architecture designed to manage the conflict that eventually became known as the Cold War. The purpose of this architecture was to contain the Soviet challenge while limiting the risk of all-out war, and the nuclear global annihilation that was the almost certain outcome of such a war. That architecture, the product of cold, realist, amoral, but mindful calculation, succeeded beyond the hopes of its architects in 1991. In doing so, it rendered itself obsolete.

In a perfect world, a careful reconceptualization of that architecture in light of issues likely to arise in the decades to come would have been thought timely at that point. In the absence of a new existential challenge to replace the Soviet Union, this was too much to hope for. What we had instead was a smug triumphalistic victory celebration. Communism had been defeated by—wait for it—“Free Enterprise”. Forget about liberty—the tangible benefits of Western democracy had won the day. Coca-cola and Benetton and Gucci; Intel, and IBM and Microsoft; Boeing and Airbus, CNN and Disney and Mercedes: these were the manifestations of the West’s obvious superiority over the Soviet system.

This narrative was too dazzling and overpowering to be gainsaid. The Western economies were generating wealth, and wealthy people, at such incredible rates, that it didn’t seem utterly stupid at the time to believe the implication: this is it—economic utopia. Get as smart as we are, and we can all be rich.

This, for want of a better term, is the Davos Consensus. The elite government, business, and media figures who meet and issue positions papers at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual Davos meetings can stand in quite well for the smug, detached, entitled stakeholders who subscribed to this “get smart/get rich” outlook on modernity.

Something went wrong with Utopia, though. There were discontents.

The Rise Of The Demagogues

Signs of trouble began to appear almost immediately. You would think that if the neo-liberal social order was so wildly successful at producing prosperity as its elite so clearly believed it to be, then voters would systematically reward the order by electing rulers who subscribed to that order. But increasingly, there were flies in the ointment. Rulers were appearing who didn’t fit the neo-liberal mold.

Alexander Stille once wrote that “Italy has had a rather remarkable record in the twentieth century as a laboratory of bad ideas that have then spread to other parts of the world. Fascism was invented in Italy, as was the Mafia, and left-wing terrorism went further in Italy than in any European country”. This quote is from the introduction to “The Sack of Rome”, his 2006 book on Silvio Berlusconi. This observation seems very prescient to me now, because I believe that Italy did indeed do the honors on a very bad idea due to infect the world (as an Italian-American, I’m not particularly proud of this). Berlusconi, contemptuous of democratic norms, fawningly admiring of power, proudly uncultured, intuitively populist, militantly ignorant, corrupt to the core, and utterly determined to evade all limitations on his own power by any means at his disposal, was indeed a warning and a portent of things to come.

He was just the first. Within a few years there came Zhirinovsky, Putin, and Orban. Yanukovic, Erdogan, and Modi. Farage, Duterte, and Salvini. Bolsonaro, Le Pen, and Trump. All in the Berlusconi mode: an eager appetite for power married to an utter lack of interest in democratic norms.

At first all these leaders and wannabes seemed sui generis. They germinated in wildly dissimilar terroirs, so that it seemed absurd to assimilate them. But they certainly seemed to have no difficulty in finding affinities among each other. For example, there is now ample documentation—in the Mueller report—that Russian military intelligence, undoubtedly at Putin’s direction, explicitly set out to aid the Trump election campaign at a critical phase in 2016, by hacking the Clinton campaign and releasing damaging documents at times calculated to do maximum political damage, and later cultivated and groomed Trump and his acolytes using classic spycraft techiques of agent recruitment and maintenance. Muller also documented the unselfconsciously corrupt enthusiasm with which Trump confidantes such as Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Roger Stone and many others embraced their seduction by the GRU.

Trump and Bolsonaro’s bromance needs no re-hashing here. Marine Le Pen felt her connection to Putin worth playing up until recently. Narendra Modi’s circumspection on condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine decidedly contradicts his country’s lopsided trading preference for the US over Russia.

Recep Erdogan—who, note, is the leader of a NATO country, with a recent history of military tension with Russia, and a clear zero-sum competition with Russia over Black Sea primacy, is playing both sides in the Ukraine conflict, furnishing weapons to Ukraine, but refusing to take a political stand against the Russian invasion. And, why should he? Where are his political affinities, really? Ideologically, he has more in common with Putin than with Biden.

And all of this without even going into the frenzy of democratic norm-breaking practiced by Donald Trump during the squalid midden that was the Trump Administration itself, and the consequent stomach-turning spectacle of Putin’s effective commandeering of US policy towards Ukraine. How did we get from the “triumph” of 1991 to this? How do we explain the cancerous metastasis represented by this challenge to the neo-liberal order?

I have a candidate explanation: anxiety.

Tomorrow: The Age of Anxiety

All 5 parts, once published, can be found here: The Resumption of History