Britain and America Are Teaching The World How Societies Die
The Death Spiral of a Society, and How It Becomes Unstoppable
Across the world, conservative parties are trying out an old trick, and making it new. With a deft combination of demagoguery, nationalism, and identity politics, they’re repositioning themselves as the defenders and champions of the working class. And because working classes have been at the bitter end of neoliberalism’s failed social contract, their fortunes in decline the world over — well, the trick is working altogether too well. There isn’t a corner of the globe it hasn’t corroded by now. India, where Modi’s chest-beating nationalism has resulted in Covid apocalypse. The Phillippines, where Duterte’s death squads roam. And of course there’s Britain and America, the Romeo and Juliet — or maybe, at this point, Adam and Eve — of failed states.
Britain and America are teaching the world how societies die. They are the societies in which this trick conservatives pull has succeeded most spectacularly, and is most notable, because it shouldn’t work. They’re rich societies, after all, not poor and powerless ones. And yet there they are, wilfully imploding.
The story’s usually told with reference to America, but this time let me tell it with the example of Britain — because arguably, of these two partners in a suicide pact, Britain, strangely enough, is now the leader. America, at least, has found a temporary salve in the form of Bidenism — the fever has broken, perhaps if only temporarily — but Britain is still in the grip of a daze of fanaticism and stupidity so extreme that to it bluntly it has no future whatsoever.
The question any sane mind should be asking, looking at the world these days, is this: why does the trick work? Why on earth would anyone in the working class — or even the middle class — think that a conservative party is on their side?
After all, working and middle classes are the foundations of modernity. They are social groups and strata and institutions that did not exist until there were liberal and social democratic wings in politics. That is because throughout history, conservatives have wanted to reduce the average person to a state of serfdom or peasantry. Whether through money or ownership or religion or the fake “science” of bloodlines or all of them, which are usually combined into appeals to structure society into some kind of natural but divinely ordained order. The noble, virtuous and pure by way of blood, sits above the peasant, inherently lazy and foolish and so on.
All this is the essence of conservative politics, and it always has been — the idea that society has a “natural” order, in which human beings are divided into the superior and the inferior. The superior therefore should naturally hold power, control, dominion — and even ownership — over the weak. Conservatives represent the antithesis of modernity — that is why they are called conservatives, after all. What they really wish to conserve is a pre-modern way of life.
And in that pre-modern way of life, middle and working classes do not exist. They are replaced by serfs and peasants — people who are born and die in debt, have no real agency, control over their own fates, self-determination, disempowered by economics, culture, society, and biology.
Now, if you’re part of an old aristocratic family, that’s wonderful. In the part of the world where I come from, and that part of the world is still pre-modern, the advantages aristocrats still enjoy are incredible. Such families have fleets of servants and butlers and footmen. They own most of society and do nothing for generations — they never have — as a result. That is precisely because the rest of society, meanwhile, is essentially reduced to peasantry, controlled by region, biology, nationalism, fanaticism, and poverty.
So why would anyone who’s not in the elite want any of that?
The answer, as it turns out — and here’s where your worst fears begin to get confirmed — goes like this.
One of the few findings from economics that carries weight — has explanatory and predictive power — is this. After financial crises, whole societies swing hard right. Why is that? It’s because in the aftermath of financial crises — when banks go bust — bad debts are nationalized. As a result, a wave of politicians emerges, predictably, who tells people that “society is now broke.” That is not true, and it is never true — a society is never “broke,” because debt on the international stage is only a remnant and holdover of centuries of slavery and empire. But I digress.
What happens, sadly, stupidly, is that people tend to believe it. “Wow!” They say to themselves, looking at largely meaningless figures. “We must be broke!” And what do broke people have to do? Tighten their belts. And so what’s known as austerity begins. Cuts are made to public services. Public institutions are dismantled. Old, big, necessary ones, usually.
That is exactly the wrong move. Because it’s at a time like this — when the economy’s sputtering — that investment needs to redoubled. But because the myth of “belt-tightening” takes hold, the gap in the economy punched by bad debt becomes a massive black hole. Government investment — which should be one of the economy’s biggest drivers — falls, precisely when it should rise. Employment craters, incomes fall, businesses go broke, and a depression results.
That is the story of modern day Britain and America. Economists don’t use the word “depression” to explain what happened to them — because, mysteriously, the economy has been “growing.” But it has only been “growing” at the expense of the average person. In America, the average person now dies in debt, just like a peasant or serf. That is something we should never, ever see in any society, period — if I was a doctor, I’d say that was like a multiple organ failure.
Why do Americans die in debt? Because the prices of basics have gone through the roof. Americans pay incredible, staggering amounts for basics. A million dollars for healthcare. As much as a home for an education. As much as an education for a home. These are crazy, crazy numbers — nobody can afford them. The result is that Americans have become a debtor nation.
Who was a debtor nation before America? Weimar Germany was. It was the nation which inspired the great John Maynard Keynes — the 20th century’s greatest economist — to figure out and discover the theory above, of how societies swing hard right. He wanted to understand how Nazism had come to happen. His answer, chillingly enough, can be summed up in one word. Debt.
When people are burdened with debts — ones they can never pay off, ones which have become forms of social control, burdens, impossibilities, cudgels — what happens? They grow resentful, sullen, angry. And a new wave of demagogues arises, who preys on this atmosphere and resentment and rage. The demagogues blame the woes of the average person — what does debt produce? Stagnation, immobility, powerlessness, hopelessness — on long-hated social groups, who are, crucially, even less powerful than the middle and working class.
And all that is what is happening around the world today.
Middle and working classes worldwide are experiencing debt-fuelled stagnation. They are falling into debts that their stagnant levels of income can’t repay. The result is a rising sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, frustration, fury. And the stupidity and ignorance that anger and rage always give rise to. What do I mean by that?
Who is it that’s demonised by the new wave of demagogues for the woes of the working and middle classes? It’s always hated social groups who are even more powerless than middle and working classes. In Modi’s India, it’s anyone who’s not a “real” Hindu. In Duterte’s Phillippines, and in Putin’s Russia, it’s the homeless, the impure, the marginalized. And it only gets more absurd from there.
In Britain, it’s Europeans. In America, it’s Mexican babies.
How can any of these parties be responsible for the woes they’re scapegoated for? They are completely powerless. How can the gay and the homeless be responsible for the misfortunes of Russians and Filipinos? How can the stagnation of India’s working classes be laid at the feet of…religious differences? Did Mexican babies, in diapers and drinking milk, rip a hole in America’s Rust Belt? But the most ridiculous demonisation of all is Britain’s. Imagine for a second scapegoating gentle croissant-eating Europeans on scooters for your own stupid, stupid political choices — the foolish choice to elect a conservative government that never cared about you, because it wants you to be a serf all over again.
Now let me connect all those dots. As middle and working classes stagnate, they return to identity politics. They seek pre-modern forms of order. “Atavism” — a nostalgic longing for a romanticised yesterday — begins to reign supreme.
Demagogues come along, who seduce them with a vision that’s terrible as it is tempting. One that’s easy to believe in. You’re not responsible for your plight, because you believed the foolish myth of austerity, and began the death cycle of a society, by electing conservative governments time and again. Oh no. It’s not your fault.
It’s the fault of those people. The ones we’ve always thought were a little — or a lot — suspicious. Different. Strange. Not like us. The ones a lot of “us” — the majority, the “true” and “real” people — have always hated. Our woes are their fault.
Austerity has become poverty has become despair has become nationalism. And nationalism, in turn, is becoming hate, fascism, ignorance, rage, greed, selfishness, xenophobia, bigotry.
This is the moment that a line is crossed. One that usually can’t be uncrossed. One generation of conservatives — ones who think of themselves as “moderate” or “mild” are the ones responsible for championing austerity. They don’t understand — they never do — that they are only paving the road for the next generation, who are fanatics, extremists, nationalists, or worse — outright fascists. One decade’s conservative politics of austerity — which fail, and produce only more poverty and despair, because what else can people investing less in each other produce? — give rise to the next decade’s politics of hate.
That is what we are beginning to see around the globe. Now let’s take quick stock. How advanced is this cycle — austerity becomes nationalism becomes fascism by way of despair and poverty and rage, thanks to stagnation and debt only ever rising — around the world?
In Modi’s India, it’s pretty advanced. Journalists are regularly persecuted, dissidents are cracked down on, and of course minorities are hated, and so on. Duterte’s Phillippines has death squads. China has millions in concentration camps. I could go on endlessly. Australia at this point has offshore concentration camps, for example.
But it’s Britain and America that really exemplify the story — because they’re the ones that imposed the choice of austerity on poorer countries, by way of this institution called “international debt” (ever wonder why the world’s “poor” countries are all former colonies, and it’s rich ones all slave owners?) In America, it remains to be seen if Bidenism is a mere temporary reprieve from insane politics of theocracy, fascism, and hate which have wracked the country for decades. In Britain, the average person votes conservative, staunchly now — despite a decade plus of conservative rule having ripped their lives to shreds. Fishermen and farmers who’ve gone bankrupt thanks to Brexit still vote conservative. LOL — laugh, cry, shake your head?
Next on the danger list is Europe. The hard right is ascendant there, too. Take the example of France. Marine Le Pen, like her father before her, is blaming the woes of the average person on…Muslims, foreigners, immigrants, refugees. Shadowy figures in the military recently penned a letter calling for civil war (that’s very French, by the way.)
France is in the crosshairs now for a very simple reason. Incomes are stagnant around the world. The middle and working classes are struggling. Their debt levels are rising, and are becoming unpayable. France is a society especially sensitive to such issues, with a long history of activism. It’s economics at the middle and working class level aren’t especially or singularly bad — but that’s only because the entire world’s are already pretty bad.
Ater France comes the rest of Europe, where again, hard right forces are on the rise. The mayor of Madrid recently rose to further power by defending fascism. Again, this has bleak and simple roots. Working and middle class stagnation.
Elites have always backed conservatives, and probably always will. Like my old aristocratic family, to them, what point is there in giving up your servants and land and money and titles, the ones you inherit at birth, just for being, well, you? The problem in the world today is that conservatives are pulling off the age old trick of demagoguery, and tricking the rest of society into believing all that, too. They’re convincing working classes that they’re on their side. And they’re doing it with the especially dangerous appeal of the demagogue: “Yes,” they say. “Maybe you should just be a peasant. Maybe that’s all you can be! Listen: but at least peasants had servants and slaves of their own! Titles and status! They had real power — over women, minorities, the hated, the nobodies — do you have any power? You see, going backwards in time, crossing the threshold into pre-modernity — it isn’t a bad deal. It’s a good one. What has modernity ever given you but work, debt, trouble, and toil — that goes unrewarded?”
And they have a point. Middle and working classes are struggling because the gains of the economy are hoarded by the top — whatever country we look at. Until those gains are far, far more equitably shared, distributed, had, invested in public goods for all, the demagogue’s siren song will stay seductive. “Ah, my friend,” the demagogue whispers, “At least under a king, a lord, a protector, a master, you are safe. You are worth something. You don’t have a secure and safe place in the world, that’s true. But at least you have power over someone else, someone weaker than you. You will have your own servants and slaves, your own identity, your own tribe and label. See? Isn’t domination easier than freedom? Isn’t freedom, in the end, too much hard work, too much uncertainty, too much struggle, for a simple person like you? Isn’t it better to be a peasant — who is also a little master of their own — in a world of power, with a tightly defined social order, where everyone knows their place. Isn’t that easier than the strange and scary world of free equals?”
Increasingly, my friends, the answer is: yes.
Umair
May 2021
WRITTEN BY
vampire.
No comments:
Post a Comment