In a post from late November, I quoted from a very brief—about two paragraphs long—reflection on the Trump era by Francis Fukuyama; to me it still seems the most honest assessment that can be made of the fundamental mystery of the last four years. As a big thinker and explainer, of course, Fukuyama should of all people be ready to supply reasons and causes to account for the direction our country has taken—and he acknowledges that plenty of these might be and have in fact been put forward: economic dislocations caused by globalization, white backlash caused by a perceived shift in social values and relative prestige, etc.
What none of these proferred reasons, however, can manage to explain is—why now? And why is it taking such an intensely aggressive and virulent form? "There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship that conventional explanations fail to capture," Fukuyama observes. We have seen a shift toward right-wing extremism, a mainstreaming of ideological currents that were previously kept to the fringes, that seems totally out of proportion to any particular concrete source of social strain or economic distress.
All of this, after all, is occurring at the end of a long "American century," during a time of unprecedented prosperity and peace. The Cold War is over; we won. (Sure, for millennials all of that feels a long time ago, but among the hard core of Trump's supporters, many are old enough to remember firsthand what that means.) There is no longer any titanic struggle afoot for the continued existence of our particular mode of life. We enjoy unrivaled abundance and a lack of serious alternatives to our system of government and economy (Fukuyama, of course, being the theorist most associated with explaining what an important shift that was).
To be sure, that prosperity and affluence may be erected over a heap of injustice. It may operate through a mechanism of growth that creates displacement and obsolescence at the very time it piles up enormous material rewards in a small number of hands. This particular paradox of capitalism, however—its two-faced character of generating poverty amidst plenty—has been apparent for centuries. So it cannot explain, once again, why all of this is happening now. Nor why the backlash is taking this particular form.
And if the Trump phenomenon were really a revolt against hardhearted neoliberalism—as is sometimes theorized—it is one of a very strange kind. It does not draw its membership from the sectors of society most excluded from the rewards of capitalist accumulation; nor has it mounted any kind of serious policy challenge to the neoliberal program. Instead, it has been a revolt of the relatively advantaged, fought chiefly in the name of slogans and symbols—a culture war, in short. And why should we be having a culture war now, when things for this country are not going particularly badly, compared to prior history?
It seems a paradox; and yet, perhaps the lesson of history is that it is anything but. Perhaps what seems a discrepancy is actually a causal mechanism in itself. It should not surprise us, that is to say, that peace and prosperity have in this case gone together with a resurgence of partisan combat, white identity politics, and the extreme tensions of the symbolic culture war—because perhaps the two have always been historically connected.
Think of how previous outbreaks of particularly virulent racism, xenophobia, nativism, and white supremacist violence in U.S. history (such as the Ku Klux Klan revival in the 1920s) have occurred—not in our moments of shared adversity and external threat—but in times of apparently boundless greed and material abundance. Think of how the 1960s "generational divide"—the massive upheavals of student protests that managed to shut down all of Paris for weeks and ground large parts of the French economy to a halt—was prompted, not in the name of any identifiable material distress, but by things far harder to define—a force that was often dubbed "alienation," a kind of ennui in the midst of postwar affluence.
"Existential" angst, ironically, came to dominate the political landscape at the exact moment that existential threats in the more literal sense were receding for the inhabitants of an increasingly prosperous Global North. With the arrival of peace and prosperity, that is to say, with the dispersal of external threats and material woes, new scope is given to the politics of personality, self-actualization, and prestige.
Reading in some of the classical authors, I discover that this is no merely modern phenomenon. I was prompted to write all of this, indeed, because of a passage found in the Roman historian Sallust. He seems to have penned the best and shortest explanation I have seen anywhere for the paradox of why abundance should breed discontent, or why victory in a global conflict could bring forth a desire to turn inward and destroy the fellow members of one's own society.
As Sallust writes, in his account of The Jugurthine War: "the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism [...] had arisen in Rome a few years earlier. It was the result of peace and abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this because, before the destruction of Carthage, mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the Roman Senate characterized the government. [...]
"Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when the fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. [...] In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated."
It's hard to read that passage in 2021 and not feel there is something prophetic in the historian's words. Swap out a few key terms and we see our own fate read back to us...
Is it as simple as all that, then? Is it just that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, we lost our Carthage, as it were? Is our factiousness and backbiting and extreme partisanship—captured as clearly as never before by the sight of a majority of the Republican House caucus voting to overturn the result of a free and fair election simply because a Democrat won—explained by nothing more complicated than the fact that we lost an external enemy, and therefore have to invent internal ones?
Of course, the true situation is a bit more multifaceted than that. Previous global and great power conflicts have never exclusively been about external foes. They have always served to furnish pretexts for questioning the loyalty and patriotism of one's domestic political rivals, or to persecute stigmatized groups. Think of the manifold political uses to which the Cold War or the "War on Terror" were put on the U.S. home front.
The latest efforts on the part of the right to elevate China to the status of primary geopolitical adversary, meanwhile, largely take on this same form—as a scapegoat for their own policy failures, an external menace by which to stir up politically-useful xenophobia, and a label with which to tar their adversaries (Trump, you will recall, even re-Tweeted content accusing right-wing Georgia governor Brian Kemp of being a Chinese spy, simply because he refused to decertify and challenge the legitimate results of the election Trump lost).
(The fact that the mainland Chinese government is actually an authoritarian, expansionary and increasingly genocidal power—presently committing mass atrocities against the Uighur minority and dismantling civil liberties in Hong Kong— is of course irrelevant and incidental to the domestic political uses it serves for the right as an all-purpose bogeyman.)
So it can't be the case that U.S. history is so neatly divided between times of external and internal conflict—as we see, the two have always gone together.
Yet, just as plainly, there is something to what we might call the Sallust hypothesis. Restless and reckless human nature will plainly not tolerate success for long. The removal of one form of discontent—war, material deprivation, a constant state of high alert and fear of nuclear annihilation—almost instantly gives rise to another; and one even more difficult to appease: the discontent of boredom. Americans, having won their wars and retired in wealth and triumph, felt—with Childe Harold—"the fulness of Satiety"; which is, after all—the poet tells us—"worse than Adversity."
What, then, is to be done with such a fickle and unappeasable species as ours, torn ever between various conflicts, the need to generate excitement through factional strife or by jousting with external or internal foes—inventing them if necessary?
I do not know what the answer is in the cosmic sense, apart from the fact that we know that human beings—while plagued with all kinds of anti-social desires and impulses from our evolutionary past—have nonetheless proven no less gifted in finding ways to sublimate these drives, rendering them increasingly less harmful...
... And also to observe that, if "Adversity" is what we seek, we have it right before our faces. It may be true that the Trump era arrived at a time of unprecedented prosperity, but it has bequeathed to us a global pandemic and an economic contraction on a scale without parallel in recent memory. If we can turn from our desire to gin up needless human conflicts we will discover that we are already in the midst of an existential struggle with an extra-human force that threatens us all. We might therefore, in a renewed effort to combat the coronavirus, find in our society at last that "moral equivalent of war" that William James wrote about.
But that, admittedly, requires a policy response and a mobilization of actual resources. Which is far less fun and easy that fighting endlessly over symbols and prestige...
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