Paging Dr. Yeats! Paging Dr. Yeats!

Some time ago, I got so tired of reading about things “slouching towards Bethlehem”, or at least slouching somewheres, that I took upon myself to announce that no one, with the exception of Huckleberry Finn, would be allowed to use that verb, at once so affectedly literary and so uncouth that the poor word was buckling under the strain. I mean, it was Huck’s word first, which he used without irony, so he’s entitled. Ole Willie B. gave it the irony, the spin, that everyone else appropriates, and, frankly, they just don’t deserve it.

Okay, that took a bit of unpacking, but I (obviously) should have tried to put a fence around another of Dr. Yeats’ all too appropriate topos, “the center will not hold” because wow. The center is not holding.

Like “slouch”, the whole western world is buckling, under the strain of both the global economy, which, it appears, for us in the West is either a very good thing or a very bad thing, which is largely a result of the East and West coming together economically, and immigration/terrorism, which is largely about the North and South coming together via population flows from South to North. The globe is shrinkin’, and folks are shakin’.

I am more “pro-global”—free trade and lightly restricted immigration—than about 86%¹ of the general population, I would guess, thanks to both my urban, not to say urbane, environment² and a decent income—so my perspective is radically skewed, but my unpacking of why the center is doing such a shitty job of holding these days is as follows:

—The rise of the global economy is destroying the “natural” advantage Western economies enjoyed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. There was almost constant growth in economic productivity for centuries, and, beginning around 1900, common folks even started to get a share of that growth, although most common folks saw very little until after WWII. But earnings for lower-income households has declined in the U.S. since 2000. Increased productivity used to both destroy jobs and push up wages (sometimes), but now the global economy has destroyed the power of unions (if they still exist), so that “capital”, which can also be described as the top 20% of households as ranked by income, captures both the profits and the benefits of cheaper, better products. Free trade, instead of opening new markets, seems to destroy existing ones.

—Starting in the Reagan era, American business used immigration, largely illegal, of low-skill workers from Latin America both to break unions and generally push down labor costs, recreating Karl Marx’s “international proletariat”. At the same time, the rise of the computer industry, and the general lure of America’s newly burgeoning upper upper class, drew the ambitious from all over the world, a phenomenon greatly accelerated by the end of the Cold War and the general embrace of what embittered (embittered and irrelevant) European leftists denounced as “Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism”, which had the unattractive feature of working, as opposed to socialism, which did not. The dramatic increase in the immigrant (and non-white) population led to the “I miss the America I grew up in” meme, which, with a few changes, is widespread across Europe as well. When the economy first stalled and then came close to collapse in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this dislike frequently turned to hatred. This attitude was, of course, supercharged by the events of 9/11, aggressively promoting a racist xenophobia now blossoming under Donald Trump here and similar leaders abroad.

—There is no necessary link between terrorism and immigration, but constant western interference in the Muslim world, very largely to control the world’s oil market, but also in response to political pressure within the U.S. to advance the interests of Israel,³ supplies endless irritants and provocations. It greatly intensifies an already existing cultural backlash that created endless varieties of reactionary Muslim thought emphasizing every aspect of Muslim tradition that was the opposite of western secularism. The enormous wealth generated by the sale of petroleum has allowed the Muslim oil states, Saudi Arabia in particular, to “pacify” religious reactionaries by pouring tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars into subsidies for these extremists all around the world.⁴

—The enormous increase in the wealth of the world has destabilized traditional non-western cultures. It also enormously expanded educational opportunities for millions of people around the globe. And it is unhappy educated people who make revolutions.

—The enormous increase in wealth has had a strong tendency to corrupt, either directly or indirectly, the ruling political class. This does not mean simply taking bribes, as has occurred in such advanced countries as Israel or South Korea, or, much worse, the many faceted billionaire crony capitalism of such diverse countries as Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. There is “legal corruption” as well. “Honest” politicians like Tony Blair in the UK, and the Clintons and Barack Obama in the U.S. are unwilling to resist the toxic allure of the company of billionaires. When so much money is available for, in effect, doing nothing but showing up, why not show up? And, somehow, the money is never enough. President Obama, after signing an enormous book deal ($60 million for his memoirs) now charges $400,000 for a speech. One suspects that half the allure of such events is the opportunity to network with more billionaires, more “big people”, so that one can jet set around the world talking about big things with big people in appropriately big settings, without ever quite realizing that all this activity is an end in itself.

—That military thang. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American presidents have used our overwhelming military superiority to enforce their will around the globe. Over and over again, they have failed, alienating and embittering one nation after another and pointlessly raising international tensions. To a significant extent they are simply the puppets of a vast military/foreign policy/intelligence complex that cannot justify itself without an “enemy” that somehow resembles the former Soviet Union in size and malevolence, even though none exists. The motive may be conquest (in the case of the second Bush administration) or benevolence (in the case of the Clinton and Obama administrations) but the result is the same: military failure, substantial American casualties, massive civilian casualties, enormous financial waste, and further alienation of non-western nations, who pump up their military spending in response to our aggression, and who, of course, must be “deterred”, further expanding our already massively wasteful defense budgets.⁵ In every case since Vietnam, American presidents have lied their country into war. In every case. And yet the same lies are swallowed over and over again. Both the lies themselves, and the further lies needed to conceal them, corrupt the political class.

—A divided, disappointed Left. Back in the day—so far back in the day that I was in high school—American liberals, though out of power under Eisenhower, were confident in their ideas. They were sure that the elimination of segregation in both the public and private sector would cause the wide gaps in income, education, health, and criminal and other “pathological” behaviors between blacks and whites to disappear; that a planned economy with a significantly enlarged public sector, similar to their beloved Sweden, would guarantee comfort and health for all⁶; and that the certain knowledge derived from the social sciences could guarantee the achievement of these goals. As conscious heirs of the Enlightenment, liberals were passionately devoted to freedom of speech, whose paramount importance was visible to them in the political and cultural struggles of the day. Many liberals had friends or relatives who had been subject to informal harassment or even criminal prosecution during the McCarthy era.⁷ The McCarthyite right frequently tried to use the danger of “communist subversion” of various institutions to justify “better safe than sorry” purges of anyone “suspicious”, which encouraged a praiseworthy emphasis on the sanctity of due process on the part of liberals. Communism itself, notoriously contemptuous of due process, was strongly rejected by liberals, which had not always been the case during the thirties and forties.

Some 60 years later, a lot has changed. The abolition of segregation did not create racial harmony. Blacks, free at last from formal and informal police oppression, as they had not been in the past, took the opportunity to inform whites how much they hated them, emotions they had previously taken the precaution to conceal. The dreams of a permanently “Keynesian” economy, with liberals always in charge, was routed by the Friedmanite “fresh water” economy, deifying markets and vilifying government. The Vietnam War split the liberal consensus, particularly in the academy, and recreated a romantic fascination with “the Revolution,” which had largely vanished as liberals became more willing to look honestly on the horrors of Stalinism. Increasingly, the left saw America as the great oppressor rather than the great liberator, and the new streams of ideology, centered around race, gender, and sexual orientation, used this idea as the common ground of agreement.

The political fortunes of liberalism withered with its twin failures to resolve the painful surge of violent black crime at home and the Vietnam War abroad. The colleges and universities, increasing massively in size as the percentage of college graduates doubled and doubled again in the last half of the twentieth century, became the great redoubt of the “New Left”, which largely ousted the old Cold War liberals. But the Left never recovered the confidence it had back in the fifties and sixties that it had the answers to society’s problems. The Old Left sentimentalized, pitied, and glorified the working class. The New Left, obsessed with identify politics, sentimentalizes, pities, and glorifies itself. Academics turned to European thinkers to explain away their inability to shape society in the manner that they had once dreamed of. Increasingly, the Left defined itself against American society, particularly after the advent of the “age of billionaires"—previously inconceivable wealth—which began back in the Reagan Era and continues unabated to this day, while the pittance that is an academic salary continues to dwindle. In such an environment, the more contemptuous you were of America, the better you were. This contempt is a cul de sac from which there is no escape. The explicit rejection of free speech and due process, now fashionable on campus, is a reflection of the fact that Left feels that it has to cheat to win.

—Remarkably, the Right feels as disenfranchised as the Left. Conservatives have never really recovered from the shock of Bill Clinton’s election of 1992, when the corpse of hippie America suddenly lurched from the grave with the irresistible force of the undead. The triumph of political correctness on the Left, which has burgeoned in the last five years, for any number of reasons, though largely confined to the academy, has had its real world successes as well, most spectacularly in the recognition by the Supreme Court of the constitutional rights of homosexuals. In addition, liberalism has achieved dominance in the West Coast and the Northeast, as well as “the media”. As the fortunes of political correctness has waxed, a corresponding hatred of the same has developed on the Right, going back to the early days of feminism but strongly increasing as a result of the continued success of political correctness during the Obama administration. The Bush counter-revolution, of which so much was expected, is scarcely a memory. Much of this reaction on the Right—the likes of Drudge, Limbaugh, Fox News, and Breitbart—has always had a strong flavor of blood and soil, but not until the rise of Donald Trump did the cult of irrationality take complete control of the Republican Party.

Afterwords
This spiel is, naturally, largely America-centric, though the rest of the globe does come in as well. We are being granted some respite, though not a lot, by a recovering world economy. The U.S., under Trump, seems very likely, due to its obsession with “toughness”, to blunder into a true foreign policy crisis, or at least guarantee another Cold War arms race, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in the process, something I just complained about last week, on several occasions, and surely will do so again.

Domestically, the crystal ball is less clear, since the administration, and the Republican majority on Congress, seem so persistently dysfunctional. The “bright side”, I guess, is that the stakes are so much higher internationally that domestic disasters aren’t likely to be that important—in comparison, at least.