Among the most widespread conceits driving political discourse today is that further degradation will eventually bear the fruit of meaningful social and economic reform. But this is simply another version of the seeds that economic determinism believes to be germinating in the decaying body of the old society. This both undersells and oversells the brilliance and hard work of the oppressed. By implicitly giving oppression credit for igniting the the fires of emancipatory action, this line of reasoning weds the latter to the former and oversells the services of the oppressor. What it removes with one hand, it strangles with the other. If the oppressor is granted credit for instigating the “double movement,” this implicitly transfers agency from the oppressed to the oppressor. Herein is denied what the modern epoch has almost universally attested: human beings under the most extreme conditions can be incredibly resourceful, not only defending their humanity, but doing so with dignity without conceding the moral high ground.
Ever since 1789, France has been held up as an exemplar of humanité; entirely ignoring the reign of terror, Napoleon, the Restoration, and, most famously, collaboration. Which is to say that the French, when pushed to the wall, respond in manners keeping with humanity at large. So it was without surprise that I listened to results from the first round of France’s national elections (http://nyti.ms/1OJ03e8). So much for the magic of the French.
There is, however, a deeper lesson for Europe and for the world in these results. Chancellor Merkel, note bene. As the social, economic, and political fabric continues to unravel, and as the combined first world response to this fraying is, with virtual unanimity, military might, the consequences of this martial strategy are playing out before our eyes. Less frequently remarked, however, is the relationship this strategy itself bears to the unraveling. It was with disbelief that voters in the 1970s faced the great economic downturn inaugurated in 1968. In 1976 they could still elect a Presidential candidate and a Congress that, when compared to today’s President and Congress, fall somewhere to the left of Jesus Christ, Gandhi, or the Buddha. A decade of downward plunging indicators were enough to convince US voters that enough was enough. Their own declining fortunes, rising unemployment, declining purchasing power, and rising insecurity convinced US voters that Ronald Reagan’s militarist, investor-friendly message was what the US needed. Great Britain’s poor fortunes convinced Englishmen and women, a year earlier, to embrace the same misguided message: here on the lips of Margaret Thatcher. Hardship and hurt do not bring emancipation. Hardship and hurt inspire demagoguery and poor judgment. Here in the 1970s begins the downward spiral.
It was this initial downward turn in investor fortunes, itself predicated on the return of Japan and Germany to global markets in the 1960s and the downward competitive pressures introduced by this return, that lent credibility to Prime Minister Thatcher’s and President Reagan’s campaign to roll back the very conditions that make for democratic process and republican institutions. Ever since the fourth century BCE, political theorists have recognized the dependence of republican institutions on the conditions of voters. Ever since the fourth century BCE, when Aristotle’s students published his lectures on Politics, those who reflect critically on political life have recognized that clear and cogent political decision-making is contingent on the well-being, the education, the security, the leisure, and the health of voters. Insecure, sick, poorly educated, and over-worked voters make poor decisions. This was the secret to Conservative and Republican Party success. Catch the public when they feel terrible and exploit their disease for political advantage, not by alleviating their disease, but by institutionalizing the conditions that perpetuate their pain. Since socialist policies are predicated on a public reasonably well-educated, healthy, and sufficiently leisured to reflect critically on the details of those policies, the declining social conditions of voters naturally favors the right wing.
We are now witnessing the consequences of these choices. Distributing the social franchise more broadly, restoring the wealth to Africa and South America plundered from those regions, would have held the promise of a broadly educated, reasonably healthy, and secure global public, a global public equipped to meet today’s challenges with something other than force and violence. A Europe more broadly educated, reasonably healthy, and secure would have recognized in the refugees spewing forth from hot spots created by first world wealth long-standing and long overdue obligations owed to the peoples of a world whose wealth they had plundered.
We can no longer look to states to resolve these problems, since states are but clients of larger international interests, but also since statesmen and women must respond to constituencies whose bodies and minds bear the wounds of state policies and who are therefore inclined to favor fascists over republicans, demagogues over representatives. We have no other option but to appeal to that thin layer of international actors whose unparalleled wealth needs to be leveraged in the interests of balance. There will be no return on their investment. Their holdings will be depleted. They will become merely wealthy men and women. But they will bequeath to future generations a world where lives we have reason to value are sustainable.
The alternative is France and the National Front and endless rounds of violence, war, terror, and death; which, might I suggest, would also be a memorable bequest.