immanence

An off-the-cuff essay, written not for any particular occasion, but just to get it out of me. It’s probably mostly common knowledge (among people on the green left), just maybe not well articulated yet, and too easily forgotten. Politically, we’re all playing a little catch-up these days.

Understanding the apparent global turn we are seeing against liberal democracy, or against “liberal globalism,” is important if we are to make inroads toward a “greener” future.

The electoral successes — and in some case repeated successes — of “illiberal” leaders like Donald Trump, Turkish president Erdogan, Hungary’s Victor Orbán, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, India’s BJP (to some extent), the strange coalition of the unpeggable (but populist) Five Star Movement and the far-right Lega in Italy, the British vote in favor of Brexit, and the ongoing hegemonies of Vladimir Putin in Russia and of the Communist Party under Xi Jinping in China — all of these mark a seeming global political swing toward authoritarian conservatism, right-wing populism, anti-liberalism, or something of the sort.

The main point of the following argument can be summarized fairly simply. It is that when a majority of people in a polity comes to perceive itself as “not doing well” when compared to a minority that is doing better, questions will arise about why that is the case. Among the logical answers that will emerge, and that can easily be fueled by entrepreneurial politicians, is that the more privileged and empowered minority, distinguished by some mix of identity elements, has tilted the balance of power in its favor, does not represent the interests of the people (and in fact acts against those interests), and that the way to overcome this is by electing someone who, by virtue of being a charismatic and powerful outsider (in some sense), is capable of acting forcefully and effectively to remedy the problem.

What I’ve described can be summarized as “populism,” though, as I’ll explain, the term is not exactly adequate. What are the implications of this “populist” or “illiberal moment” for environmental politics?

To answer that question, I’ll begin by clarifying some terms; then I’ll pose the situation as a problem; finally, I’ll describe it as an opportunity for political action in a green, eco-social-democratic direction. In the end, I’ll argue that what our political moment needs is neither “business as usual” nor the politics of resentment offered by the illiberal populists; but neither is it helped much by the dystopian angst of much contemporary environmentalism. There’s a deficit of utopia in the world, a deficit of futurism that might imagine things very differently. That’s where a solution might be found.

1. Terminology

Let’s consider the options for describing the diverse cast of characters and trends listed above.

There’s “populism,” which seems to be the mass media’s favorite, but it’s vague and arguably confusing. Its virtue is that it captures the perceived distinction — perceived by those who agree with its tenets — between “the people” and an elite minority that has prospered at the expense of that people. In effect, democracy begins as populism: historically, democratic revolutions have always been popular movements in resistance to, and usually intended to overthrow, traditional rule by an elite, such as a monarchy or aristocracy. Marxist revolution is a variation of that — in industrial circumstances, at least, its goal was the overthrow of capitalism, which always means the overthrow of an elite of capitalists.

To gain popularity, populist politicians demonize that “elite” and do their best to shape and motivate the body politic of “the people.” When there are easily identifiable differences to be corralled into these two constructs — racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, or other differences — they will be corralled. Even when those constructs are partially or entirely made up — as in conspiracies of Masons, Knights Templar, Rothschilds, Jewish cabals, the Illuminati, the New World Order, and so on — their ethno-religious inflections remain as fodder for the next set of populist politicians to fan into flames.

As political theorist William Connolly (and others) have argued, however, the term “populism” conflates too many variations of the appeal to “the people,” “people power,” or the “national interest” in opposition to one or another “elite.” While the term describes Trump, Erdogan, Orbán, and the Brexit vote fairly adequately, it can just as easily be applied to Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, and to many politicians (unlike these) who follow political winds without necessarily committing to any. (Ukraine’s Yuliya Tymoshenko might be considered a good example of the latter.) There may be a few things that unite all of these characters, but even those things — for instance, their critique of ruling elites, and even their critique more recently (in most of the above cases) of international trade liberalization — are perceived quite differently by all of them.

“Conservative authoritarianism” is a more precise term, and largely does describe most of those mentioned in the second paragraph above. But it doesn’t capture the popular appeal of their calls for protectionism against the global economic order. Something similar could be said of “fascism,” except that the latter is a stronger, much more specific, and far more emotionally loaded term, with connotations that make it less adequate to describing many of the names listed above. (For one thing, fascism suggests a response that is much more somatically-affectively and militarily embodied. Fortunately, fascism has not quite taken hold in Trump’s U.S., Putin’s Russia, or any of the other circumstances mentioned above, though its early indicators are clearly evident.) “Authoritarian nationalism” may work as a better term in this context, though it still doesn’t capture what these movements are against.

“Illiberalism” and “anti-liberalism” are terms that, conversely, do not adequately express what these movements are for, but they do convey what most of them are against — which is the seeming hegemony of “global liberalism” or “liberal globalism.” (Related terms — such as “illiberal democracy,” the “nationalist international,” “hybrid regimes,” and others — get used in this context, but they are generally combinations or variations on those already mentioned. See Note 1 below.)

And in the present circumstances it is precisely this commonality that makes these movements more than just a local phenomenon. Liberalism, perceived as a moral, cultural, and economic order, is by and large seen by these figures as an enemy, and often as the enemy. (This may not be entirely the case with Modi, Duterte, or even Erdogan, but it certainly is with Trump, Putin, Orbán, Kaczynski, and some others. So here it may also be a matter of relative emphasis.)

In the eyes of illiberal populists (let’s use this combined term), global liberalism has either failed or is an affront to the values they hold. In its morality, this liberalism is perceived as standing for individual freedoms but against collectively defined “traditional,” “religious,” or “moral” codes and values (pertaining to family, gender roles, ethnic identities, and the like). In its culture, it is seen as standing for a pan-humanism that is color-blind (even if it’s been racist and colonialist in its historical expressions) and that is, in practice if not necessarily in theory, “integrationist.” That is, it sees people as more or less interchangeable and it welcomes their participation in liberal economies. Put differently, it fails to recognize and protect the integrity and distinctiveness of what is perceived as the “home” or “majority” culture — the national, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and cultural distinctiveness of “America,” Russia, Hungary, (Hindu) India, and so on. And in its economics, liberalism is perceived as standing for a free market tempered only (to one degree or another) by a collectively defined regulatory apparatus that may also be perceived as burdensome, unfair, or biased in favor of “elites.”

Here’s where two other distinctions become very important.

The first is that between liberalism as a set of ideas and principles and the ways it has been put into practice, unevenly and often very selectively, by the recognized global hegemon of the last 75 years: the United States. That’s a topic that has been covered in many places, but it deserves repeated acknowledgment at a time when liberalism seems under threat.

The second distinction is that between liberalism and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is largely unconcerned by certain of the rights and freedoms — particularly collective rights and freedoms — fought for by many liberals. Instead, and more importantly, neoliberalism places greatest emphasis on winnowing down the apparatus of governance to a self-serving corporate-individualist skeleton, one that maximizes the rule of the market over everything imaginable. It sees the “free market” — an economic regime liberated from any moral, political, or cultural constraints — as the high-water mark of civilization, the most efficient and rational way of organizing society. (Neoliberalism is of course more complex than that — and more self-serving for those who advocate it — but for our purposes let’s let that suffice.)

2. Problem 

The main problem, for anyone advocating either liberal or social democracy, is that neoliberal policies have been pursued and put into practice by the most powerful governments on the planet over the last four decades or so. This is true across the political establishment’s left-right spectrum. It is especially evident in the US and the UK, where it has included practically every single leader of the last 30 years — from Reagan and Thatcher (who, with Chile’s Pinochet, arguably launched the neoliberal revolution at a national level) to Clinton, Major, Blair, Bush, Obama, Cameron, and May.

One of the results of neoliberalism has been a dramatic growth of economic inequality and a corresponding decline of the middle class. Another has been social dislocation on a scale larger than many had seen before (at least over the previous 40 years). While many people around the world have made gains from neoliberal globalization (especially in developing countries), many have clearly suffered. Neoliberalism has, in consequence, given liberalism a bad name (for its critics). This is in part why liberal democracy has so little appeal these days.

Social democracy, in its turn, is perceived as little more than an inefficient, bloated and top-heavy version of liberal democracy. Green politics, where it’s even known as such, is seen mainly as a variation of social democracy, with less emphasis on things like affirmative action, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and social justice — goals that have never been particularly popular with white/national (male) “majorities” — and instead with a focal emphasis on environmental and economic regulation.

In some countries, like the US and the UK, social democrats like Sanders and Corbyn appeal to many younger voters because these voters have never seen genuine social democratic principles put into practice. They have only seen those principles cut back by one or another representative of neoliberalism — either the conservative kind (Reagan-Thatcher-Major-Bush-Cameron-May) or the “liberal” kind (Clinton-Blair-Obama). So eco-social democracy could have an appeal, but that appeal is still limited in its potential scope — i.e., mainly to younger voters in countries that have not had a social-democratic establishment in recent decades (unlike, say, in Germany, Spain, Sweden, Italy, France, et al.).

3. Opportunity

The appeal of the Trumps, Erdogans, Orbáns, and Putins is that they present themselves as being forcefully different from the liberal (i.e., neoliberal) globalist political establishment. They promise to be not only less beholden to “elite interests,” but willing to rein in those interests (particularly in their guise as bloated bureaucracies) — in ways that are decisive, effective and efficient, and that will be “in the people’s interest.” They promise to “drain the swamp,” bring things under control, and govern in the interests of the people (of Russia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, the US, et al.).

Even if we know that they won’t actually help the “people’s interests” (far from it, in most cases), we need to understand their appeal.

If it is to make any progress in the current conjuncture, green politics — which I see as a form of eco-social democracy (though its forms can be more multiple than that) — can learn from this appeal. Specifically, it can aim to carve out a position that’s similarly perceived as forceful, efficient, and in the people’s interest.

Forcefulness is best seen as leadership. The illiberal leaders are perceived as strong because of their resolve, their commitment and willingness to “go it alone” and to act outside of the “buddy networks” of international globalist politics, and so on. Green political leaders can, and arguably should, also be resolute, committed, consistent, and willing to do what’s necessary. What that means in practice is a little difficult to say since there are so few recognized Green political leaders on the map of world politics today. But that can change.

Efficiency presents more difficulties. This is in large part because the problems that environmentalists understand to be central are so large and unbounded, so all-encompassing, and so amorphous in their causalities that efficiently responding to them is almost impossible. Here, the solution is to continue to articulate responses that aren’t premised on pie-in-the-sky changes (such as the downfall of capitalism). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize capitalist, or certainly neoliberal, practices; we should. But solutions need to be articulated that build on existing conditions and visible trends. Among such trends are those that work toward international collaboration and cooperation, which should be seen (rightly) as building conditions for efficiency in ways that competition and “America Firstism” do not. (On some level, however, efficiency is just another word for forcefulness; on its own, it’s neither here nor there.)

Finally, articulating what’s “in the people’s interest” is the most important part of the task for greens. As Gramsci and others have long shown, articulation of a common interest is how a public becomes a “people” — through a shared understanding of interests and concerns, and of the territorial spaces where those interests are expressed and acknowledged.

The authoritarian and illiberal populists appeal to a notion of the people that is readily available, even if it takes some cultivating, because it comes from an understanding of the past: Hungary for Hungarians, America for (white) Americans, Russia for Russians (with its ostensibly glorious past), and so on.

Green politics, by contrast, appeals to a notion of the people that comes, if anywhere, from the future — an idea of a global or planetary humanity that has never really existed except as a vision, and that, as such, has never taken deep hold among most people. So we have to look to other ways of making the case that environmental causes are people’s causes.

The environmental justice movement has been doing that for three decades now, and it has made inroads among minority communities; continuing that will be a key part of the global struggle in decades to come. But it hasn’t penetrated Trump country, “flyover country,” and its many analogues around the world. Articulating the connections between land, locality, territory, identity, and global environmental challenges such as climate change — so that those issues come to be seen not as the concerns of urban elites (scientists, academics, et al.), but as deep and genuine concerns of regular folks — is arguably the most important task facing green politics today.

There are, of course, conservative and even fascist political actors who have appealed to environmental concerns to make the case for going backward . What environmentalists (of the eco-social democratic variety) need to be doing is cultivating identities that are linked to local, regional, and sometimes national economies, but that are not ethnically or racially exclusivist and oriented to the past. These identities can get their strength from an understanding of the connections between people’s lives and the bio-ecological and geographic realities that shape and cradle them. There are reference points in the past that contribute to such understandings, but the core should be a case for bioregional futures that require collaboration across national and (micro- and macro-) regional boundaries, because they require configuring new ways of living in the world.

For good or for ill, there is a conceptual vacuum in global politics today. This is precisely why the illiberals have been succeeding. It’s not that they are articulating a powerful and promising vision that’s shared across the world. It’s just that their vision is the only one that appears to provide hope (for their supporters) for holding back the otherwise unstoppable tide of problems represented by “globality” in its sociopolitical and ecological forms.

At a global level, the illiberal pursuit of national interests is not likely to capture the passion of a global majority. Nor (for most people) will a politics of business-as-usual. What might capture that passion, and what greens should be working toward, is an eco-social democratic vision — a world of bioregionally relocalized, but intersecting and interacting, political communities that are united by a common interest in global survival, multiplicity (among humans to start with, but not only), and flourishing (all around).

There are ways that such a vision can look, and sound, and feel, and taste, and smell. These can be imagined, suggested, depicted, described, provoked, enticed with, debated, and enacted.

Utopianism certainly has its risks, which is why its enactment requires a humility and gentleness of spirit that is also not helped by the dystopian angst that’s so easily conjured up among us these days. When things out there look bleakest is when we need to remind ourselves of the sources of joy within (which is what we are trying to do next month with Feverish World). And to act from that.

It will take time and effort to articulate such a vision in ways that will capture the imagination of the world’s divided polity. But I don’t see anything else that could be up to the task of helping us navigate through the rest of this century.

For further reading

See the special issue on illiberalism of Society and Natural Resources. The editorial is open-access.

Notes

1. In “Is there illiberal democracy?” Jeffrey Isaac provocatively asks that we consider the proposals of today’s illiberal leaders as genuine proposals, even if tainted by their authoritarian methods:

“But why deny that they offer a version of ‘popular sovereignty,’ and thus of ‘democracy,’ even if their version would seek to transform an electoral victory into a permanent mandate to rule in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ – an objectionable version of ‘democracy’ to be sure, and even an authoritarian one? Denying that this is an interpretation of ‘democracy,’ even if an objectionable interpretation, makes it difficult to understand the ideological struggles of the 20th century. And it also makes it difficult to understand the popular, demotic source of the contemporary appeal of the Orbáns and Trumps of our world. For a great many right and left populists do ‘play on the register’ of democratic values, and challenge real deficiencies of liberal democracy, and claim to promote a more authentically popular mode of representation. And understanding what they are doing with words, and how their words are resonating, is essential to understanding their power.”

He notes that the “question of their ‘sincerity’ – whatever this might mean, and however much this might be gauged – is beside the point.” What’s important is that democracy has become the guiding promise and the term of contestation in today’s political world.

“Today, all the factors of public life speak and struggle in the name of the people, of the community at large. The government and rebels against the government, kings and the party-leaders, tyrants by the grace of God and usurpers, rabid idealists and calculating self-seekers, all are ‘the people,’ and all declare that in their actions they merely fulfill the will of the nation. Thus, in the modern life of the classes and of the nations, moral considerations have become an accessory, a necessary fiction’ (R. Michels, Political Parties (2001, 15-16). . . modern politics is in large part defined by competition for the banner of ‘democracy.’” 

Isaac’s essay garnered a wide set of responses on the pages of Public Seminar (one of the most readable and interesting blogs around today), which I won’t try to summarize. In one of the responses, András Bozóki offers a set of terms that have emerged to describe the various “hybrid regimes” that populate the “grey zone” of this kind of illiberalism:

“semi-democracies, semi-dictatorships, “guided,” “sovereign” or “managed” democracies, delegative democracies, illiberal democracies, liberal autocracies, electoral authoritarianisms, competitive authoritarianisms and the like.”

Yet all “constrain the political activity of citizens and move in an authoritarian direction,” which leads Bozóki to conclude that they are not democracies at all, despite retaining elements of democracy. That said, several of the participants to this debate, including Isaac, acknowledge that liberal democracies have themselves failed to uphold their own democratic standards in various ways. In Isaac’s delineation, there are obstacles to the formation and growth of opposition parties or movements, material inequalities that favor some groups over others, public and private media oligopolies, and other constraints on political debate and activism that skew the democratic potentials of most developed western democracies (see pp. 12-13 of Isaac’s article pdf here).