Global whew
Heads of state are breathing a HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF.
Remember when Trump tried to yank Trudeau’s arm off at the front door of the White House? And failed because Trudeau was expecting it and stiff-armed him with the other hand?
Portugal.
Fiji. I read the other day that getting back into the Paris Agreement is at the top of the list.
Belgium.
Iceland.
And the nation of Cher.
More than one phew, too.. Quite a few, if the news be true.
… and a sotto voce ‘oh, fuck’ from A. B. deP. Johnson, I suspect.
I must have missed Netanyahu’s tweet on that list.
And Putin’s.
I’ve been seeing stories that Putin will possibly be retiring next year due to declining health. If it’s true that he’s planning on going I doubt it’s for health reasons. I think he’s seen what he’s managed to do to America by helping Trump get elected and realised there is nothing he can do to top that feat, so he’s quitting while he’s ahead.
AoS, Stalin would be envious.
The way I deal with existential dread in the face of things like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism is to read thoughtful analyses on these subjects by others. This rarely offers any cause for more optimism*, but at least it moves the sense of danger from a purely visceral “gut” level to something that can be understood and dealt with on an intellectual level. Recently I have been revisiting The People vs. Democracy by Yascha Mounk and On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (I am currently reading Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom as well). One point raised by both these scholars is the way liberal democracy has long been taken for granted in the West (“The End of History”, “The Only Game in Town”, “No Alternatives” etc.). Snyder talks about the “Politics of Inevitability”. Mounk describes how the default assumption used to be that once a society has changed governments through free and fair elections a couple of times, as well as reached a certain standard of living, democracy has been “consolidated” and isn’t going anywhere. This explains both why the double whammy of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump could come as such a shock to many people and the tendency to normalize the populist assault on democratic norms as just a minor fluctuation within “politics as usual”. If democracy is inevitable and the Only Game in Town, then whatever we’ve been witnessing for the last four years must be a continuation of the democracy we know in slightly different packaging.
This tendency to normalize is further aided by the idea that democracies – if the ever die – die “violently”, as a result of armed revolutions, civil wars, military coups etc, hence anything that doesn’t involve tanks in the streets and armed men in uniforms storming the National Assembly must, by definition, be “normal” and “more of the same”. Indeed one of the things that make us so ill equipped to deal with both climate change and the rise of trumpism is the human brain’s imperviousness to gradual change. As long as we never “cross a line” where the climate crisis instantly and abruptly goes from “no problem” to “Armageddon”, it’s only too easy to tell ourselves that everything is normal and nothing has really changed. Likewise, as long as we never “cross a line” where society instantly and abruptly mutates from “definitely democratic” to “definitely not democratic”, it’s too easy to tell ourselves the same thing.
However, gradual erosion over time can cause as much destruction as a sudden explosion. Mounk argues – and I agree – that these are not “normal times” (as we used to think of it). Even in “normal times” losing an election is of course a setback, but it doesn’t significantly diminish your chances of winning the next time. Losing and election in the current situation could very well mean that there won’t be a “next time”.
Bottom line this is no time for complacency. Even if the prospects of getting rid of Trump himself look more promising than ever, it doesn’t solve any of the problems that allowed him to get elected in the first place. Getting rid of trumpism may prove a hell of a lot harder than getting rid of Trump. Until we manage to solve those problems I fear that every election for the rest of our lives is going to be a referendum for or against the survival of liberal democracy, and heavily rigged towards the latter.
* As someone trained to be suspicious of my own thought processes and constantly on the lookout for self-deception, wishful thinking, motivated reasoning etc., I fully agree with the former leader of the Norwegian Central Bank who said that “nothing is more depressing than unjustified optimism”.
Bjarte:
I agree almost without caveat, which is unusual for me. I’d stress that “the double whammy of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump” were not unrelated but have a tangle of underlying causes which seem to be ratcheting up the boldness of racists to racist, misogynists to misogynist and so on more overtly than has been the case in my lifetime.
I think this is one of the reasons we keep getting in such a mess when we try to explain these problems in terms of left vs right when the left seems globally to be getting more authoritarian and the right comes over all reasonable on a few subjects, although its motivation likely differs greatly from mine.
Latsot
It’s interesting to note that my country also has a strong anti-EU movement. Of course in our case we never joined the EU in the first place, but the majority has voted against joining in two previous referendums. I was old enough to vote the last time (this was in 1994), and I too voted against joining. I later changed my mind, and if there had been another referendum ten years later I would probably have voted yes. Today I’m really not sure what to think.
Anyway the Norwegian anti-EU movement has traditionally been mainly a centre-left coaliton and more concerned with things like protecting natural resources from big business abroad than immigration. That’s how it used to be anyway. Or at least so we thought*. But times are changing, and who knows what’s really driving other people any more. As you said, thinking of everything in terms of the old left vs. right paradigm seems less and less instructive. Our own populist right party – somewhat confusingly called Fremskrittspartiet (i.e. the “Progress Party”) – used to be too extreme even for our own (traditional moderate, fiscal conservative, pro-business) Right. Today they’re not even too extreme for our own (liberal, not socialist) Left, and it’s not because the Progress Party has become more moderate.
* Come to think of it I was pretty right-wing myself back in 1994, so…
On a side note, Mounk’s book seems to lend further support to iknklast’s skepticism that millennials are going to solve everything. He cites several poll results that seem to indicate that young people on average are far more open to strongman leaders and even military rule than older people. As someone once put it, progress isn’t caused by the passage of time.