immanence

This article was modified on July 11 to clarify a few points (mainly in the third paragraph) about multipolarity and media.

The potential re-election of Donald Trump; the fact that Marine Le Pen’s (and Jordan Bardella’s) National Rally took the greatest number of votes in France’s parliamentary elections; the ongoing leadership of conservative populists like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Narendra Modi in India, and even more authoritarian figures like Vladimir Putin, whose popularity in Russia continues unabated by his war on Ukraine — these things tend to shock, surprise, and dismay many of us who are committed to liberal-democratic or social-democratic values. But they really should not be so surprising.

By the same token, Joe Biden’s failure, at last Thursday’s debate, to communicate an alternative to Trump-style authoritarian populism, an alternative that should be obvious but that isn’t, is not just his own failure. It’s a broadly institutional failure of western leadership, and also not exactly a surprise. Let me explain.

The last fifty years have seen deep wealth disparities exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies, even as leaders of western nations have extolled the benefits of democracy, capitalism, market values, and economic globalization. Meanwhile, the bipolar world of the 1950s through the 1980s descended first into a unipolarity, in which wannabe “joiners” of the West like Russia saw their polities decimated by neoliberal policies that helped their wealthiest and hurt their most vulnerable — and then to the beginnings of a multipolarity defined less by the forces of any kind of emergent global democracy than by wannabe neo-empires like Russia, Iran, and China. Concurrently, media, which have become both digital and global, have become part of the terrain of competition (and, in fact, war) between these powers — even as media display and flaunt the continuing disparities and bring ongoing wars and conflicts ever closer to us.

In the background, the real challenges of our time — ecological destabilization, large-scale toxification produced by industrial capitalism, and now a rapidly changing climate — have ignited processes that render whole populations ever more vulnerable, that pit groups of people against each other in the quest for resources (resulting in more wars and social conflicts), and that set off waves of migrants scrambling across borders. Even as climate and ecological changes are ignored or denied, their effects are very real, and the handy denial of the causes (offered by conservatives and by capitalist elites) only results in a deflection onto other imagined causes — global cabals, divine retribution, and the like.

As the world becomes increasingly unstable and seemingly feverish, and as the West’s mainstream solutions — the stay-the-course more-of-the-sameism of leaders like Biden, Macron, and before them Blair and Clinton — fail to convince, the only politicians whose campaigns resonate widely are those with clear, easily-digestible messages. These are messages that draw upon fear — fear of change, fear of otherness (of migrants, of people who don’t look or talk “like us”), and fear of the unknown — and that promise the return of a backward-looking, insular sense of social solidarity. They appeal to those who feel “left behind” by a global elite. In a globally mediated world, that elite is pretty visible, and so the sense of “left behindness” is palpable.

That’s precisely what the Trumps, Putins, Orbáns, and Le Pens propose to assuage in their followers. They offer the solidarity of an imagined past — of “white Christian America,” or “white Christian Europe” (Orbán, Le Pen, Meloni, et al.), or “Great Russia” (Putin), or “Hindu India” (Modi). It’s these politicians who are most successful at communicating their vision today, and it’s their politics that are arguably, and regrettably, in the ascendant around the world. They constitute the world’s conservative-populist moment, a moment whose fascist tendencies threaten to blow up into a full-scale form like that found in Russia today. In this sense, Putin is a harbinger of things to come, and Trump is his western, “democratic” echo.

In times of crisis, communication is paramount. This is why Biden’s failure to communicate last Thursday — which capped a tenure of capable, even astute, management, but one curiously lacking in any ability to communicate a vision — was as significant a failure as it was. But it’s a failure that is not just his own. It’s the failure of an era.

The solutions the conservative populists offer are, of course, false. What the world needs is more like the opposite. The present state of things calls for a vision not of fear, but of love — love of life, love of the diversity of humanity, and love of its past and future relations with Earth’s biotic and ecological systems. And it calls for the promise of a forward-looking and expansive social solidarity, one that takes from the best of human potentials rather than the worst, and that is inclusive rather than exclusive — inclusive not only of humans who look and speak differently from us, but of the nonhuman relationships and interdependencies that we depend on, that today depend on us, and that necessarily will contribute to a viable future.

It’s an eco-social vision that has yet to be articulated clearly and forcefully. We can find it here and there, in amidst the plethora of left and green intellectual currents in Europe (for instance, in France’s Nouveau Front Populaire, which will be contesting the second round of French parliamentary elections this coming week). We even find it more incipiently even in strands of conservativism around the world, which try to connect a sense of community (however limited in their imagination) with a historical rootedness in place. We hear it amidst the tangled narratives espoused by some of the more forward-looking religious leaders (Pope Francis comes to mind), and in the mixed messaging of President Biden’s euphemistically misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

But it is yet to be coherently articulated — as an inspiring, even captivating, forward-looking vision — by recognized global political leaders. Those who come closest to articulating it tend, not coincidentally, to be women, like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Finland’s Sanna Marin, Slovakia’s Zuzana Čaputová, Germany’s Annalena Baerbock, Colombia’s Francia Márquez, and Brazil’s Marina Silva (among heads of state or prominent political figures).

What all this means is that if the world appears to be “going Trumpist,” it’s because there is not yet a coherent spokesperson for the credible eco-egalitarian alternative that is needed. Trumpism, Putinism, and their kindred base themselves on fear and bigotry. What we need instead is a vision of climate transition and global eco-social solidarity.

Who will articulate it?

The fact that the above image comes from 2015 says something… This moment is a long moment.