irredenta

The papers and online media have been filled with typical presentist sound-and-fury analysis that seems to almost relish the prospect of being forgotten the next day. In this sense, the coverage of the election results is itself a significant part of the carnage any thinking person has to reckon with. 

Seeking out alternative resources of hope, I’ve been perusing my own personal library for reflective minds that might yield some measure of instruction in these dark times. I was especially pleased to happen on a strikingly prescient review piece by the late Tony Judt, public intellectual par excellence. The 2007 review is of Robert Reich’s book, Supercapitalism, which is just as instructive to read today. But the part that grabbed my attention was the following passages at the end of the piece that not only foreshadow the manifestation of fear in especially toxic forms of ethno-nationalism and economic instability, but also imagine how we might rethink our political engagements in ways that would make for a more inclusive and stable democratic coexistence. Here’s the bit:

“... Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

Half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an “economic age” collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent—in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities—that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.

We need to recover some of that sense. We are likely, in any event, to rediscover the state thanks to globalization itself. Populations experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity will retreat to the political symbols, legal resources, and physical barriers that only a territorial state can provide. This is already happening in many countries: note the rising attraction of protectionism in American politics, the appeal of “anti-immigrant” parties across Western Europe, the call for “walls,” “barriers,” and “tests” everywhere. “Flat worlders” may be in for a surprise. Moreover, while it may be true that globalization and “supercapitalism” reduce differences between countries, they typically amplify inequality within them—in China, for instance, or the US—with disruptive political implications.

If we are indeed going to experience a return of the state, an enhanced need for the security and resources that only a state can provide, then we should be paying more attention to the things states can do. Today we speak contemptuously of the state: not as the natural benefactor of first resort but as a source of economic inefficiency and social intrusion best excluded from citizens’ affairs wherever possible. The very success of the mixed-economy welfare states—in providing the social stability and ideological demobilization which made possible the prosperity of the past half-century—has led a younger generation to take that same stability and ideological quiescence for granted and demand the elimination of the “impediment” of the taxing, regulating, and generally interfering state. This discounting of the public sector has become the default condition of policy discourse in much of the developed world.

But if I am right and our present circumstances will not endure indefinitely, we might do well to take a second glance at the way our twentieth-century predecessors responded to the political challenges of economic uncertainty. We may discover, as they did, that the universal provision of social services and some restriction upon inequalities of income and wealth are important economic variables in themselves, furnishing the necessary public cohesion and political confidence for a sustained prosperity—and that only the state has the resources and the authority to provide those services and enforce those restrictions in our collective name.

So a week and half has elapsed since the election and the president-elect has accomplished the following thus far: appointed an avowed bigot and white nationalist (Steve Bannon) as his chief strategist, picked a hardline former general (Mike Flynn) who's declared Islam "a cancer" as his national security advisor, nominated a documented racist who once failed to win confirmation to a judgeship because of his racist views (Jeff Sessions) as his attorney general, is seeking national security clearance for his children who also will be running his businesses, and settled a $25 million lawsuit about his scam university. Those are the highlights of just the past 1.5 weeks of his transition to power.

One of the more striking aspects of this election is the proliferation of “studies” just about every aspect of it. Think tankers carry out studies adjudging the implications of Clinton’s or Trump’s policies. The effects of sex, gender, race, class, ideology, religion, region, education, party affiliation, profession, and age on political preferences have been studied to high kingdom - as have been the multiplicity of biases purportedly derived from them. Surely this is the most over-studied election cycle in modern Western history! 

Yet, none of these studies seem to actually tell us much about politics, if you examine them more closely, or more importantly, if you take the time to actually speak to ordinary people. People hold contradictory and contingent beliefs all the time. But their politics are even more elusive and conditional. 

A number of years ago, when I was half-way through my doctoral work (in political science), I started noticing a senior professor asking the same question of visiting lecturers, political figures, job candidates in political science, and activists at public events. The question was straightforward enough: what is your understanding of the political - of what politics is? I’ve never observed so many people active in either the study or practice of politics appear so naked and feeble, so perplexed and inarticulate at the sight of what one would assume to be an elementary question for anyone interested in politics. 

I found this both fascinating and disheartening. So one day I decided to ask the professor about this particular question (shockingly, no one else yet had!). His reasoning was thus: most people confuse doing politics with thinking about it, and of those who think about it most think they know what constitutes politics but have a hard time explaining why it can’t be explained the way a game, a work of art, a cuisine, a product, or an institution can be explained. This, he went on to say, makes any “study” of politics at best a terrible approximation of reality. At worse, it was “camouflage ego” with citation of other camouflaged egos. 

Since that exchange I’ve become skeptical of the work and rhetoric of anyone who can’t offer a description of their thinking about politics. It doesn’t need to be a convincing or a reassuring description - just one that demonstrates the person’s consideration of it in the first place. 

It’s worth remembering the actual distance traveled from more innocent times, once in a while. I just happened on a photo from 1992 - when I was 12 - in which the only visible electronic device is a hideously large intercom/doorbell system with multiple wires dangling from it. Nearly everyone in the photo is smiling, but not everyone is looking directly at the camera. The Fujitsu or Kodak disposable camera with which this photo was taken must have been a frivolous novelty to the older family members avoiding its intrusive gaze. Little did anyone know just how much more intrusive technology will become. 

This image of an irrecoverable past can be deceiving, though. On the one hand, there’s something undeniably sweet and innocent about it. Family members gathered in a circular room, tethered by nothing other than conversation. Each person’s presence is vividly felt by others. Not captured fully in this picture, however, are the rigidities, the silences, the awkward asides and glances that passed for conversation but which were in fact stand-ins for emotional detachment and/or shyness. We were manifestly two-dimensional, each one of us. Back then, there were no indirect outlets to let our parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents, siblings, or friends know that we were capable of engaging at higher levels - that there was a third dimension to our personality after all. One either brought all the dimensions to social gatherings, or two dimensions it was. 

One of the enduring pleasures of my graduate school days was getting into verbal spats with the late Fred Halliday, who was every bit a pugilist as he was a doting mentor. His erudition and voice are especially missed these days. Here's a timely piece he wrote on terrorism before his untimely death. The last few paragraphs are vintage Halliday: discerning, full of commitment to liberal democratic values, and optimistic:

The central challenge facing the world in the face of 9/11 and all the other terrorist acts preceding and following it, is to create a global order that defends security while also making real the aspirations to equality and mutual respect that modernity itself has aroused and proclaimed but has spectacularly failed so far to fulfil.

Terrorism, then, is a world problem in cause and in impact. It should be addressed in a global, cosmopolitan, context. Europe will probably be again its victim, but it is also historically and morally a contributor to this abuse of political opposition, and an architect of political violence.

All human beings, European or not, are locked into a conflict that will endure for decades, the outcome of which is not certain. In engaging with it, citizens need five things: a clear sense of history; recognition of the reality of the danger; steady, intelligent, political leadership; the building of mass support within European and global society for resistance to this new and major threat; and above all, our best defense, a commitment to liberal and democratic values.

The Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (1921 ):

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

Jihadis attack and proudly proclaim their responsibility. Government officials react by vowing swift and just revenge. Left-wing people implore the rest to examine root causes that link back to Western governments' actions. Right-wing people lash out at immigrants, refugees, and blame lack of military resolve. Muslims, on the main, rush to absolve Islam. Non-Muslims wonder why, on the main, such attacks keep occurring in the name of Islam, justly or not. Literary types revel in pointing out pointless ironies embedded in everyone’s positions. Sporting types do the only thing they ever seem to know to do during moments of crisis: bow their heads under the watchful eyes of television cameras and observe a moment of silence before earning their keep. Then there’s the rest of us nobodies, seeing and hearing it all, forming and discarding views of our own, unsure of what, if anything, does any of this even mean.