Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
– Simon and Garfunkel (“The Sound of Silence”)
20 MARCH 2023 — Today is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — a multi-decade debacle that would see hundreds of thousands of innocents killed, trillions of dollars flushed down the drain, America’s image in the Middle East destroyed, and the acceleration of the end of U.S. hegemony. The beginning (and end) of shock and awe. Or so we thought. Today, illiberalism is on the march, all over the world.
Today is also the first day of the summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, in which the leaders of the two authoritarian great powers reiterate their de facto alliance, calling each other “best friends”. With one of those powers actively engaged in a war of conquest against a peaceful neighbor, and the other threatening to do the same to his peaceful neighbor. The world has been plunged back into the horrors of the early 20th century.
So today is the perfect day to drag out of my drawer an essay I started about one year ago in my hotel room, but never finished. I started it after 3 days of filming at the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, Poland – and 1 day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Which really started in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea but let’s not get wrapped up in details for this essay.
And yes, you might consider it a bit of a melodramatic post, with some over-the-top language, but I was determined (at the time) to write something about the inevitable (unstoppable?) rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism. But I shall not apologize. I think it’s difficult to overstate the danger. We humans have a strong tendency to stick our heads in the sand until it’s too late, and we need to wake up. Although the older I get, I have become more of a pessimist, more of a cynic, and think it is too late already. However, consider this a work-in-progress so perhaps I’ll revisit my cynicism.
But I will start by asking you to remember a crucial piece of this story: it was American folly that began this baleful trend. Our victories in “World War 2” and “Cold War 1” gave the U.S. the unique opportunity to build a world where countries don’t invade other countries. When it invaded Iraq without cause or provocation, it threw away that opportunity. It brought back the principle of “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”. It opened the gates, and allowed the Darkness back into our world. Now it’s America’s responsibility to help fix what it broke. Although I think that is now impossible, both politically and just realistically.
There is a Darkness creeping over our world. Again, maybe a melodramatic thing to say. But when I reach for words to express the profound unease that I feel watching the advance of illiberalism across my planet, the language of fantasy novels, children’s movies, and video games is the only one that seems up to the task. Throughout my youth, I consumed a great many stories that all had the same basic premise — an ancient evil, long ago banished from our world, is now returning, and once again we are called upon to rise up and fight it. Perhaps all those stories shaped my worldview and made me see complex, gritty reality in epic, Manichean terms. Or perhaps the stories were written by people who had themselves lived through a global wave of illiberalism, and were trying to pass down a warning.
Yes , yes , yes. I know. There is plenty of darkness in the world even at the best of times. Wars, ethnic cleansing, rights violations, suppression of speech and religion … these things are always, or almost always, happening in some part of the globe. No leader and no country is spotless. The blood on the hands of George Bush and Tony Blair are ever present. And yet observers of comparative government and human rights are able to clearly identify times when respect for the rights and liberties of human beings begins to gutter and wane.
We are now in one of those times. The news headlines from around the world give us a continual stream of dark portents. The atrocities across Ukraine. The concentration camps and forced mass sterilization of minorities in China. Millions rendered stateless by law in India amid a retreat of secularism. The coup attempt and election denial as a normalized political strategy in America. Rising authoritarianism in Hungary, in Israel, in Turkey, in the Philippines. Protesters massacred in Iran and in Myanmar, suppressed in Belarus, suppressed in Georgia. Mass surveillance everywhere. Internet shutdowns. “Anti-terrorism” laws.
But headlines are just anecdotes. Unfortunately data tells the same story. Freedom House, a think tank that tracks political and civil liberties around the world, warns in its 2022 report that “democracy and pluralism have never been in greater assault since World War II”. Well, you can quibble with Freedom House’s measurements and definitions (the 1950s and 1960s were horror shows if you know your history), but at least they’re consistent across time, and for a decade and a half now they’ve shown a world inching toward illiberalism. Even The Economist’s “Democracy Index” shows a deterioration in the last four to six years.
For perspective, I think the world is entering its darkest moment at least since the 1970s, when it saw the Cultural Revolution, Indira Gandhi’s brief dictatorship, and a resurgence of expansionist Soviet authoritarianism under Brezhnev. The key difference is that this time, as Freedom House’s report warns, all of the world’s most powerful countries are trending toward illiberalism at the same time: China, India, Russia. And China is by far the most autocratic of the great powers, however much Trump and Modi chipped away at democracy. Those two created nothing like the massive surveillance state, pervasive party apparatus, and systematic minority repression that China has built. Its slow but steady territorial expansionism against multiple neighbors threatens to bring back an era where big countries take what they want, regardless of international rules. Russia decimation of Ukraine proves that.
Even more troubling, however, is America’s democratic decline. In the 70s, remember, Nixon failed to become any kind of authoritarian, and social movements forced the U.S. to evolve in a more liberal direction in most respects. That assured that America and its rich and powerful allies in Europe and Asia became bastions of liberalism (more or less) in the later stages of the Cold War.
But that is not happening today. Trump did not start anything. He was simply following on America’s trend over the last 2 decades. Oh, he did various nasty things (family separation, using federal agents as cops, theft of government secrets, $$$$ deals across the globe, etc.) But his biggest threat here by far is the rejection of electoral democracy by the dominant faction of the Republican Party. Trump’s attempt to brazenly deny the result of the 2020 election and use every means short of civil war to overturn the result was not a one-off thing. It provided a blueprint that the GOP now has embraced for the future. They have now unshackled themselves from any obligation to abide by future election outcomes they hate, and are putting in place the machinery to overturn them.
If electoral democracy in America relies on Democrats never losing an election, it’s doomed. If the GOP doesn’t change its tune and agree that the rules by which Americans choose their leaders are legitimate, the next decade could be one of rolling constitutional crises, or worse.
But beyond America’s flirtation with autocracy, the coalition that it assembled to win the Cold War is just much weaker now than it was in the 1980s. China has seen its share of world GDP balloon from less than a fiftieth to almost a fifth; it’s now the world’s largest manufacturer, and a strong technological rival to the U.S. Not only that, but unlike in the latter half of the cold war, China and Russia appear to be solidly allied. Meanwhile, America’s old Cold War allies in West Europe and Japan are still rich, but they’re relatively small countries with aging economies.
Thus, even if America manages to pull out of its downward spiral and become a reliable bastion of democracy again, it faces a much sterner opposition than it did in the 1970s and 1980s, with generally weaker allies.
We could therefore be looking not at the darkest time since the 1970s, but the darkest time since the 1930s. And anytime someone says “the 1930s”, you know it’s bad news.
But why has the Darkness broken the seals and returned? How did our world begin to fall into Darkness? Why did a 25-year trend of increasing human freedom and human rights stall and go into reverse? Everyone is going to have their favorite answer to this question. Those will include the death of the WW2 generation, the rise of social media, new disruptive technologies, economic inequality, the failures of late capitalism, and so on, and so on. Any and all of those might well be contributing factors.
But let me give you my answer: “fear”.
If Freedom House and the other studies are to believed, the Darkness began to return right around the mid-to-late 2000s. Two notable geopolitical events occurred in that decade — the rise of China, and the Iraq War. And both events can be interpreted as being broadly part of the same overarching trend — diminution of the United States of America.
The Iraq War did incalculable damage to the moral standing the U.S. had accumulated since its intercession in World War 2 and its construction of the postwar liberal order. It invaded a non-threatening country on the thinnest of false pretexts (don’t deny it; read the history), inflaming an entire region of the globe. Hundreds of thousands died. A few of its troops committed well-publicized atrocities.
That war crushed the U.S. image across most of the globe. There was a brief but only partial rebound during the Obama years, and then another collapse under Trump. Unlike during the Bush years, foreigners now seem to generally realize that America is a divided country rather than a militaristic monolith, and they sympathized with the slightly more than half of the country that resisted Trump’s encroachments on liberal values. But the fact that America is deeply divided made it clear that it will no longer function as the bastion of democracy that it represented during World War 2 and the latter part of the Cold War.
But at the same time it was flushing its moral leadership down the toilet of an unnecessary war, America was rapidly losing its status as the center of the global economy. China’s spectacular rise — much of which came at the expense of workers in America and its allied countries — placed it at the center of the Asian economy, which in turn is rapidly becoming the beating heart of the global economy.
The killer in the U.S. was “The Great Recession” which caused a general loss of faith in America’s finance-and-consumerism-driven model, while China’s manufacturing-based model seemed to shine in comparison. That was always partly an illusion — China’s rapid growth is enabled by the fact that it’s still much poorer than developed countries, while its conquest of recessions comes at a cost in terms of slowing productivity. But it’s just so dang big of a country that to many onlookers, those technicalities may not matter. In economic terms, America was “The Big One”; now China is “The Big One”, or might be soon. And economic terms have a way of translating into military terms. Although China has a lot of technology development issues to work out.
America’s simultaneous relative economic decline and absolute moral decline created a vacuum at the top of the world. The world is not a governed place; what order exists is provided only by hegemonic powers. And when the U.S. forfeited its moral hegemony and lost its economic hegemony, every country in the world suddenly found themselves in a position of not knowing either whose power or which principles were in charge of the planet. So … TA DA! … Mr Putin and Mr Xi see an opportunity to remake the global order. Or disorder, depending on your viewpoint.
Not knowing who is in charge creates fear. Fear that if you get into a war with your neighbor, there won’t be a hegemon to appeal to. Fear that your local regional powers may be able to slice off bits of your territory and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it. Fear that your government will be able to abuse you without international moral condemnation. Fear that you won’t have a foreign market to sell your goods to. Fear that you won’t be able to move your goods freely by sea. Fear that trade deals will break down. Fear of genocide. Twitter is always awash with genocide threats. Occasionally they become reality.
And when you’re afraid, you turn to someone to protect you. A strongman politician. A ruthless military. A powerful neighbor, even if it’s an autocratic one. An ethno-nationalist movement. Any source of strength, of security, of safety. And if necessary, as a last resort, your own two hands.
That is exactly what happened to the world in the 1930s. When Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, he was talking about a banking crisis, but on some level he already knew that he was really talking about the Darkness. World War 1 had collapsed the old European-centered global power structure, and the U.S. and USSR had not yet taken on their superpower roles. Germans lusted for revenge for World War 1, but that wasn’t the only thing that drove them to Hitler — it was fear, of economic devastation, of foreign domination, of permanent instability and decline. A similar process brought the rise of militarism in Japan, and Stalin and Mao leveraged plenty of fear as well.
As Antonio Gramsci said, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. Jesus, I forget how many times I have quoted him in my posts.
Restoring economic and political leadership will be hard when America is on the other side of the globe from the emerging economic center of the world. One thing Biden has got right is his bet that to continue to dominate in cutting-edge knowledge industries is key. That means dishing out a lot of money for scientific research. It also means continuing to take in large numbers of skilled immigrants, so that America dominates the global pool for top technical talent, but it seems to be backsliding there. And America might (finally) see that maintaining and building infrastructure (it’s shit right now), and attacking the problem of ruinous costs in the health and construction sectors (which are reaching the point where they’re dragging the whole nation down) needs #1 attention.
But if economic and political leadership will be hard, moral leadership will be even harder, especially given the deep hole that America finds itself. The amount of inequality and poverty in America is astounding – so the world laughs when it says “hey, we have an excellent model to follow!”
Because in the end, the most serious threat to America’s democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within itself, its own personal attitudes, and within its own institutions. That’s the real battlefield.
That’s it. A short rant. I know. This essay needs some work. And I have not even addressed the clusterfuck that Europe finds itself [groan]. But this was more about the U.S. and the residue of the Iraq war on its history.
But we are on a long, darkening journey. And I shall not be around to see how the story really unfolds. It will be up to others to determine if they can face down the Darkness … and throw it back.
For me, now, some more reading and writing.