By Austin Mackell
My phone is a portal into hell. Through it I watch helplessly as the worst things imaginable happen, and then those horrors are surpassed. And the people in hell, they know we are watching, they know we can see what is happening to them, that we tell ourselves we are helpless.
But we are not, and they know this, and so they compete for our attention, which can mean the difference between life and death, for them, their families, their nations.
So the desperate fathers of Sudan and Gaza compete for my attention, so that I can compete for the attention of my own government, who can, we pray, make a final appeal, all the way up to heaven, where the god king looks down upon us all, deciding who will live, who will die, what nations, what families.
Rulers of once proud nations throw their treasures at his feet, beg for mercy, beg for access.
He pulls power to himself like a black hole. It’s happening faster than you think. There’s no more time to waste.
History has directionality and path dependency. It only moves forward, and what we do now (or don’t do) affects the future, irrevocably from this moment on until the end of counted time. The stakes are always high, but have rarely, maybe never, been higher than they are right now. Humanity is at a crossroads.
Somewhat paradoxically, I believe that in this moment of maximum urgency, when so much is at stake, is when it is most important for us to stop, breathe deep, think slowly, and take the long view.
History tells us that in times of crisis, huge gains are possible. But so are huge losses. The only thing that’s not possible is political and social stasis. That’s not how history works.
As Slavoj Žižek said at Occupy Wall Street, in 2011 “The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are”.
In this speech, and as in his work more generally, his claim is that not only is neoliberal global capitalism bad, and not only did Stalinism fail, but that the Keynesian welfare state is now “passé“.
In the conditions of today’s global economy it no longer works. For the welfare state to work you need a strong nation state which can impose a certain fiscal politics and so on and so on. When you have a global market it doesn’t work.
He goes on:
And the third point which is most problematic for my friends, the third leftist vision which is deep in the heart local grassroots democracy of all leftists that I know – this idea of critically rejecting alienated representative democracy and arguing for local grass root democracy.
Neither local, nor national democracy is the answer in the age of global economic integration. Fair enough. But Global Democracy doesn’t even rate a mention? What about a global welfare state, practicing a Keynesianism that consolidates gains in the imperial metropole, and animates the massive untapped potentials of the global majority, who live outside it?
But this silence, this unspoken consignment to the crazy basket, is an honour to us, and to our cause.
The thing about a taboo is not just that you mustn’t do or say the forbidden thing. You also, at least if you aren’t a child or a simpleton, mustn’t say that you mustn’t say the forbidden thing; you’re supposed to know in advance and maintain the silence.
First they ignore you.
I am not saying that Žižek is part of any conspiracy, or that he’s self-censoring. I am saying that at least on this topic, his thinking is in line with the cynicism he and German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk rightly identify as the guiding ideology of our era, and taboos are central to any ideology.
If he wasn’t somewhat in line with, or at least unthreatening to, the ruling ideology, he wouldn’t have been granted his central, lucrative, visible role in the media circus. He plays his part, the rambling hopeless Marxist, par excellence. He’s no threat to anybody.
He has soaked in this bone-deep cynicism which our best philosophers can name, but not escape.
And it is this cynicism that is the only real objection to the idea of a federated world – reformed global institutions, a world parliament – long looked forward to as a way to end war, poverty, environmental destruction, and prepare us for the challenges we will face as a globally unified, spacefaring civilization.
Once it was an almost assumed step, on our path to a Star Trek like post racial, post scarcity, post national, unified human polity. It was endorsed by leading intellectuals; Einstein, Gandhi, and Camus. Camus even participated in a direct action with world citizen activist Gary Davis, — and spent the night in a Paris prison as a result.
But then, apparently, enough people – mostly boomers – shrugged enough shoulders, and moved the conversation back to food and real estate, and so we stayed in the land of the long nineties, endlessly recycling failed Clintonite policies, permanently disabled by our own feckless consumerism, apparently.
But behind this apparently apolitical cynicism is in fact the ideology of nihilism, pushed by an illegitimate and undeserving elite, to protect the status quo.
Now, even in the face of a potentially existential crisis like nuclear war, or climate change, in the face of multiple livestreamed genocides, our civilization can only shrug.
It’s not so much that adapting to climate change presents, even in a worst case scenario, an insurmountable technical challenge. I suspect that it is in fact technically and logistically possible to move whole cities and food supply chains at timescales that would keep us ahe ad of the rising water and changing weather patterns.
But it’s also possible – and has been for half a century at least – to phase out fossil fuels entirely and avoid the need for such adaptation, to prevent, rather than cure or live with the problem. This is in fact, the easy option. But we have failed to act, in doing so choosing the hard option. The paralysis seems terminal. This is because of our exhausted and broken down global system, which is in desperate need of renewal and reform.
If we are unable to deliver that reform, we should expect more and more authority and power to accrue to the global mafioso Trump represents. Just as the old Roman institutions lingered long after the fall of the Republic, so the institutions of American democracy may remain in place long after they have lost all meaning. This enlarged, global presidency -like a renaissance papacy – will be fought over by powerful families, factions and client-patron networks that extend beyond the borders of the US, and so operate above its laws – above all laws.
As ever more power accrues around the throne, the pretences will fall away. Either we move forwards towards global democracy or we fall into the abyss of a global dictatorship.
The End of American Exceptionalism
In October of 2016, I interviewed Shadi Hamid (then of the Brookings Institute, now of the Washington Post), and we got into a polite but fiercely contested debate about the role and relevance of the United Nations, given the overwhelming military might of the United States. Pushed on the contradictions of a world where some Trans-Atlantic alliance basically made up the rules of the international order as they went, opting in and out of the UN system at will, he admitted:
“If you follow my train of thought there is a risk that it could lead to a problematic situation. So I’m sort of assuming this ideal of a US that will more often than not do the right thing. Now it’s totally plausible that in the next 20 years – let’s say Trump wins and then after that it’s some other crazy dude and that’s we just start doing for a while; that we could have us leaders who make very dangerous decisions that destabilize the [world], they ignore the UN and all of that, so I’m sort of presuming reasonable people being elected, not Donald Trump.”
I have been unable to reach Shadi for comment on this, but the only sane thing to assume is that he would have a fresh rationalisation for the same, intellectually and morally bankrupt position. After all, he works in Washington. His Uber driver, especially if he is a recent migrant, would be likely offer more insight, because he’s not made a career out of perpetuating a fundamentally unjust and incoherent system.
The opinions of elites, even lower tier elites, like Shadi’s are much more fiercely policed, in this our proto-imperial age. But the population at large, unlike these intellectual court eunuchs, still remember how to dream of a better future. For this reason, as the data clearly shows, around the world they support a federated global democratic system, and have done so over time.
The exception is America.
The most opposed outlier is the United States, where all proposals are rejected by majorities, ranging from 55 percent against the democratic and global issues specification (see figure 6) to 70 percent against an unspecified world government (see online appendix, figure AF28). One possible reason—in line with our findings on power as a potential explanatory variable and further evidenced by relative public skepticism in Russia (see online appendix, figure AF23)—is the United States’ exceptional status as the world’s primary superpower 5.
Even when carefully worded to make it clear national governments would retain significant sovereignty, support in the US only rises to 45%. But that is in an environment where not a single public figure, and probably no professional academic or intellectual, is prepared to go to the mat for the idea.
And Americans, if they do not wish to rule over us all by force, for all time, holding the world hostage with a nuclear arsenal and a global network of forward operating bases, must one day learn they are part of a global public.
And that global public is ready for a better future. All that is missing is a community of dedicated thinkers and organisers who can catalyse this change. If you want to be part of making that happen, join WFM today.