Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end

When I went to first grade, I learned to print my name and hide under my desk in case of a nuclear blast. When I went to the movies, I saw news reels of U.S. above-ground atomic weapons tests in Nevada. (Nobody worried about fallout then.) In 1968, my parents could stand on their front lawn in Falls Church, Va. and see the sky over Washington, DC red with flames, because our nation’s capital was burning. I missed the show because I was headed for Vietnam. On 9/11, I saw smoke in the sky and was told that it was coming from the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, five blocks from my office. (Actually, it was coming from the Pentagon, across the river.) While I was in Vietnam, I served on the crew of a 105 mm howitzer and, though I was never in severe danger, I was shot at with some regularity, though no ill effect. And those were the good old days. Twenty years in, why has the 21st Century been such a bummer?

Those of us who lived through the Cold War thought we would always have it with us. We believed (I certainly did) that U.S. liberal capitalism was both morally and economically superior to communism, but the idea that communism would ever significantly weaken, much less collapse in pathetic disarray as it actually did, seemed absurd. No serious person, no “realist”, would ever succumb to such wishful thinking.

And yet it happened. The dream we dared not dream popped into reality faster than we could conceive it. And in a space of only a few years, we seemed to be entering a new and better world, one where the benefits of both political and economic transparency—free speech, free elections, and free markets—were so overwhelming that no government would or could swim against the tide. Why be poor and weak and miserable when you can be rich and strong and happy? Yet scarcely 20 years later, we are stuck asking ourselves, were we all just fools?

For the first decade of the 21st century, terrorism seemed the great new burden in our lives, a burden to which the U.S. contributed greatly, by its constantly aggressive foreign policy—even the eminently unmilitary Barack Obama was unwilling to resist the supposed charms of regime change, even though it failed over and over again, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, not to mention alienating national leaders and populations right and left, while damaging the standing of the Democratic Party at home, the Libyan misadventure in particular surely costing Hillary Clinton the presidency.

If Hillary had won, she would have spent her single term in office (it’s doubtful, to my mind, that she could have won a second) being pursued by a screaming horde of “conservatives” bent on her destruction, for destruction’s sake. It is the right that bears the primary burden for America’s compulsive interventionism—because they realized that without an enemy they lacked a reason for being, as they still do¹—but “liberals” like Hillary and Obama stupidly fell for its allure as well, and we have reaped the whirlwind as a result. And, while Donald Trump is seemingly winding down U.S. presence abroad, at least in Afghanistan, he is compulsively ratcheting up tension with Iran, and also Venezuela, while bloating the already bloated defense budget beyond all reason, and while receiving virtually no pushback from the Democratic establishment, who simply can’t see past the pork.

Yet terrorism is only a minor component in our current whirlwind. Long before 9/11, in 1994, in fact, California Republican Governor Pete Wilson promoted “Proposition 187”, intended to bar the use of any public services, including education, by illegal immigrants. In 1995, negotiations between congressional Republicans and President Clinton over welfare reform were tied up almost entirely over the issue of services to legal immigrants, which Republicans strongly opposed. Terrorism naturally increased hostility of immigrants, but now, as fears of terrorism have declined, hatred of immigrants, aggressively fanned by President Trump, have increased. It is globalism itself, once seen as a panacea made real, that is now regarded as the real enemy.

Globalism, in the form of “free trade”, was earlier seen as a panacea back in the 19th century, though it signally failed to prevent World War I. Going back another century, to the 18th, the triumphant spread of universal, liberal, Enlightenment ideals, particularly when borne abroad on the points of French bayonets, sparked a particularist reaction that is not much different from what we are seeing today. American triumphalism, at least from an American’s point of view, is not, in itself, as noxious as the Napoleonic version, but it’s been bad enough, especially when coupled with the Great Recession of 2008, which certainly can be attributed to the blind faith, not merely in the great superiority of free markets as compared to any other form of economic organization, but in their actual infallibility, which should have been understood as false, but was not.

Western notions of tolerance, embracing not only race and religion—nominally, but only nominally, acknowledged as valid around the world—Judaism “tolerable”, but Zionism not, for example—but sexuality were pushed aggressively by both the U.S. and the European Union as a justification for our activities in other countries and continents, which otherwise might have struck others as naked imperialism.² Economic growth was very largely welcome at first, but quickly began to display significant problems, both at home and abroad. In many cases, third-world countries’ gains were first-world countries’ loss, and comparative advantage doesn’t always work the way David Ricardo said it would. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the countries of Western Europe—“Western Europe” writ large—have been building up a massive advantage in productivity that it is finally being liquidated. Until recently, western manufacturers could charge what were effectively monopoly prices, reaping monopoly profits, which, thanks to labor unions, often officially encouraged by democratic governments, they had to share with their employees.

That cushion, taken for granted and assumed to be part of the natural order of things, has now largely disappeared. A 40-year-old worker, being paid $28 an hour to drive a fork-lift truck in a Chevy plant, loses his job. He can get a new one, “safe”, for the time being, driving the same fork-lift truck for Amazon, for $14 an hour, but he won’t be happy. Despite the endless hype about those “good” manufacturing jobs, and how we never should have let them go overseas, the secret was not the job, but rather the exclusivity. Now that western manufacturers have lost their technological superiority, the high wages of the past can only be maintained by coercive restrictions on imports that force domestic customers to pay more for products whose quality will degrade over time as producers “adapt” to captive customers.³

The impact of foreign competition, principally from China, of course, was magnified dangerously by the Great Recession, along with other factors, like the expiration of the “Multi-Fiber Agreement” in 2005, which had protected textile manufactures in western countries up until that point. Yet while there were very obvious winners and losers in the western economies, the same was occurring in the once “Third World”—new prosperity but also new instability, and humans do not deal well with instability. All around the world we see the divisions between urban and rural, the expanding “new” economy and the declining old one, the sense of being “left behind” seeming to exist almost everywhere, and very often looking to authoritarian leaders for protection against the global economy, not to mention "foreigners".

In Europe and the United States, the liberal elites damaged themselves by riding, at great expense, with little to show for it, the great hobbyhorse of environmentalism, a gross self-indulgence that has wasted untold billions while one international conference after another ends in unmitigated vagueness, because when push comes to shove, governments aren’t going to cripple their economies to please idealistic poseurs anxious to prove how unselfish they are with other people’s lives. The recent “yellow vests” protests in France were triggered in significant part by increases in diesel fuel costs imposed for environmental purposes. The environmental movement bitterly opposes the use of nuclear energy, which produces, of course zero carbon dioxide, fanning the pre-existing popular fears of nuclear plants at every opportunity. Repeatedly, environmentalists prey upon ignorant, pre-scientific, and really anti-scientific fears of scientific progress, particularly in the ridiculous and entirely unjustified opposition to genetically modified organisms. Invariably, the real goal is to justify a massive bureaucracy to tame the wild beast of capitalism, resulting in decreases in economic growth, and increases in economic misery, all in the name of “Nature”.

Yet, of course, there was a massive increase in wealth thanks to the growth of the global economy, but the distribution left something to be desired. The corrupting effect of the “new inequality” was a significant contributing factor to the loss of faith in the international elite, the dreaded “Davos set”. In many countries, like Brazil and South Korea, the corruption was direct. Since everyone was getting rich anyway, why shouldn’t the hard-working politicians share? Why should they scrape by, after decades of service, when entrepreneurs twenty years their junior were making literally billions?

The “legal corruption” practiced by such leading “First World” figures such as former prime minister Anthony Blair, the Clintons, and the Obamas has been only slightly less demeaning. The immense sums that can be earned by “consulting”, for giving trivial speeches to wealthy companies who are clearly buying “access”, the charitable work that necessarily involves hobnobbing with the ultra-rich—people who can get things done!—is inevitably corrupting, though the participants insist that it isn’t, because otherwise they’d have to stop. Once sampled, it seems, the private jet lifestyle can never be forsworn.

The great danger today—that is, once we get past this COVID-19 stuff, however we do it—will be the presumably continued rise of China to virtual economic equality with the U.S., leading to a massive collision with our self-chosen “unique” role as moral arbiter of the world. The notion that we might “allow” China to dominate Asia as we dominate the entire Western Hemisphere is difficult for many American military and foreign policy “experts” even to understand. It’s such a contradiction to all their preconceptions—particularly the notion that since the U.S. always acts for laudable motives any opposition is misguided at best and more likely morally contemptible—that they can’t even reject it. You can’t reject what you can’t understand. They argue past their critics’ arguments without even comprehending them.

It’s possible, of course, that China’s continuing descent into increasingly authoritarian rule, with high-tech features that Stalin and Mao could only have dreamed of, will hobble that country and force it into a crippling economic stall. The Soviet Union collapsed above all because communist economic doctrine made communist countries’ economies increasingly inefficient. Czarist Russia had been a major wheat exporter. After 70 years of socialism, the Soviet Union couldn’t feed itself.

Currently, however, China doesn’t seem to be on that path. And the whole “president for life” thing certainly seems to be taking off, with both Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary clearly anxious to get on the bandwagon. I think it will end badly, for all the countries involved, but even a system of government as dysfunctional as communism survived for 70 years in Russia, and China’s economy is much stronger than Russia’s ever was, nor is it hobbled by the economic burden of an immense, useless military and an immense, counter-productive empire, which cost the Soviets hundreds of billions of rubles to subsidize every year.

Despite all this, I think that Francis Fukuyama, who I have yet to mention by name, largely got it right when he said that free markets and free minds are the last, best answer to humankind’s needs and its need for fulfillment. Liberalism has been pronounced dead many times. Sneering at the bourgeoise has been a way of life for intellectuals on both the left and right for almost two centuries. Up until the 1980s it was very widely believed throughout the West that some sort of democratic socialism—a centrally managed economy—would eventually emerge as the norm In all societies. And yet the failure of socialism, and the triumph of capitalism, occurred with amazing suddenness.

Now, of course, there has been a massive reaction against neoliberalism— “Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism”, they like to call it in Europe, not the least because “small government” very frequently means “less spending for higher education.” In the U.S., academics blame all their blighted career prospects on neoliberalism, which impoverishes them while turning heartless hustlers into billionaires. The retreat from the “traditional” liberal respect for free speech and due process of law is particularly disappointing,⁴ both on the politically correct left, where the privileged upper middle class seeks to preserve its privilege to run things by denying its privilege,⁵ and on the right, where a manufactured romanticism over a more authentic past serves as a cover and excuse for revenge against foreign ideas, hated for their superiority. This is an old story, analyzed by Pankaj Mishra, about whom I’ve frequently written, mostly in praise, with regard to recent developments in Islam, How to think about Islamic State, which appeared in the Guardian back in 2015.

Mishra very shrewdly treated the current Islamic reaction to “the West” in terms of the first major East-West culture clash that resulted in a major self-examination by representatives of the non-western culture, that of Russia,⁶ specifically through the eyes of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

… Dostoevsky … saw most acutely how individuals, trained to believe in a lofty notion of personal freedom and sovereignty, and then confronted with a reality that cruelly cancelled it, could break out of paralysing ambivalence into gratuitous murder and paranoid insurgency.

His insight into this fateful gap between the theory and practice of liberal individualism developed during his travels in western Europe – the original site of the greatest social, political and economic transformations in human history, and the exemplar with its ideal of individual freedom for all of humanity. By the mid-19th century, Britain was the paradigmatic modern state and society, with its sights firmly set on industrial prosperity and commercial expansion. Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky quickly realised the world-historical import of what he was witnessing. ‘You become aware of a colossal idea,’ he wrote after visiting the International Exhibition, showcase of an all-conquering material culture: 'You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal.’

In fact, Mishra noted, today you can find your Dostoyevskies all around the world, noting that, after his London visit, “Dostoyevsky first began to explore at length the very modern torment of ressentiment that the misogynists of Twitter today manifest as much as the dupes of Isis.” In my own take on Mishra’s article, “Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Diagnostician or Disease?”, I argued that perhaps what Dostoyevsky, the son of a man who owned human beings (serfdom was not abolished in Russia until 1861), most “resented” about the West was that he was not recognized as a gentleman, a man to whom deference was due for his education and refinement.⁷ In a recent article in the American Interest, Norwegian scholar Asle Toje has a long meditation on the German city of Magdeburg, “A Ruinous Obsession”, in which he eventually gets round to discussing “The Swelling Song of the Billy Goat” (Anschwellender Bocksgesang) a 1993 essay by Botho Strauss, a well-known German playwright, which Toje sees as the first volley in the post-Cold War campaign against liberal ideas:

The essay was a metapolitical act, a “rebellion: against the total rule of the present, which wants to rob and rid the individual of all presence of an unenlightened past, of what has come about historically, of mythical time.” Strauss advocated an attitude that would seek “to re-establish contact with prolonged and unmoved time, [ . . . ] being essentially a deep recollection and in that sense a religious or proto-political initiation.”

Again the complaint of the “special man”, angry that the world fails to properly reward his specialness, the dislocated man, the “déraciné”, inventing his vision of a mythical past wholeness as the opposite of what he really is, and denouncing others for being what he is.⁸

Ever since the rise of the bourgeoise in the 19th century, intellectuals have felt increasingly isolated and bitter towards a society that fails to sufficiently appreciate them, even as, for the first time in history, “civilization” actually starts to pay off for the mass of humanity. The sense of dislocation persists, the notion that somewhere there is something that is more profound, that is all embracing. Yet shallow, common, middle-class values, “vulgar capitalism” and “vulgar empiricism”, exposed a thousand times, by both the right and the left,⁹ will, I believe, continue to re-emerge triumphant over the years.

Afterwords
I’ve faulted liberal elites perhaps most extensively here, and conservative elites, well, almost endlessly, but perhaps most extensively here (domestic policy) and here (foreign policy). Several years ago, Matthais Mathijs had a nice article, “Europe After Brexit: A Less Perfect Union” in Foreign Affairs, describing how elitist thinking in Europe went astray.

1. Over at the “Bulwark”, young conservative Robert Tracinski, to whom I have not always been kind, describes this phenomenon from the inside: “In the middle of the 20th century, conservatism went from being dismissed as a set of “irritable mental gestures” [by critic Lionel Trilling] to having several competing ideological frameworks—some more “libertarian,” some more religious. These all found common cause in the fight against Soviet communism—but it is now clear, in retrospect, that in the absence of such a defined enemy (radical Islam served the role briefly), conservatism is falling apart. Not only is it losing whatever unity it had. It is losing its own sense of self-definition and instead is degrading back to the level of irritable mental gestures.”

2. The Moslem societies of the Middle East, sitting on their vast pools of oil, could always afford to ignore western values in fact. Saudi Arabia in particular poured surely a hundred billion dollars or more over the last few decades into funding mosques and Moslem studies programs all around the world, dedicated to a retrograde, bitterly sexist and homophobic theology that is aggressively hostile to Judaism in particular and western values in general. The unique importance of oil, and its unequal distribution around the globe, frees those who possess it from the “normal” rules of economics. That was changing, to a degree, thanks to the emergence of the U.S. as a major oil exporter. Where we are going now is a pretty open question.

3. Wage subsidies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which go directly to the workers without increasing the cost of goods or services, are, it seems to me, a superior substitute for labor unions, but the political appetite for such a large, obvious subsidy remains to be seen once we return to “normal” times, whenever that will be and whatever they will look like. But even then, there is no real possibility of returning to the “old America”—which now seems very old indeed, and very far away.

4. Bill Clinton championed “tough on crime” measures as a matter of political survival. He supported added penalties for “hate crimes”, largely, those committed against homosexuals, as a way to do “something” for gays that would not alienate social conservatives. President Obama displayed a disappointing lack of concern for due process on a number of occasions, particularly, of course, when it came to cases of sexual harassment on college campuses. “We know they’re guilty, so why give them a chance to get away? They don’t deserve a chance to get away! They deserve to be punished.”

5. The latest eruption of what one can only hope is “late woke”—“baroque woke”, one might call it—is the New York Times infamous “1619 Project” pilloried by me on several occasions, in which young people in prestigious, high-paying jobs bravely took it upon themselves to lecture us common folk on what ignorant, racist slobs we all are. And we never even thanked them!

6. Russia was already “semi-western,” thanks to St. Cyril and his fellow missionaries from Constantinople who brought Christianity to Russia so many centuries ago. Other non-western cultures never thought the West had anything to teach them prior to the Industrial Revolution.

7. Dostoyevsky was not a landowner, and his finances were often a mess, but he did enjoy a middle-class existence, however precarious, with servants—at least a few—which put him well above the great struggling mass of Russian humanity. In The Brothers Karamazov, a character says that in the future everyone will be free and equal, even servants. He can’t imagine how one could live without servants, but somehow it will have to be done.

8. In the U.S., of course, Trump's admirers are constructing an absurd theory enshrining this gluttonous oaf as the new übermensch, his greatness a function of his contempt for the law, for the law guarantees the rule of mere numbers.

9. Almost 10 years ago I threw a punch at Günter Grass for writing a stupid anti-Semitic poem, calling it “the latest unnecessary squeezing of Euro-leftist sour grapes.”