As everyone recognizes, the world as a whole is having a giant spasm of resentment, the likes of which we haven't seen since at least the 1930s, and maybe, at least in its global scope, never before.
No one knows what is going on in the world; we're all in the dark about why the world seems to be collapsing. And again, it is the whole world--not just the US, not just the US and the UK, not just the US and UK and EU, it involves India, Brazil, Canada, Australia, maybe elsewhere too--it is truly a global crisis. Maybe the first global crisis. At least the first global crisis "from below."
One interesting thing about this crisis is that it has generated global thinking. I find useful insights from people thinking hard about these issues as they impact all the places mentioned above, and sometimes from those places as well. The web helps here: there is an incipient global conversation about these things. Of course, we could all use a bit more generosity of spirit in discussing this, along with everything else, though I doubt that will be happening anytime soon. But still, it'll be worth our while to pay attention.
The political scientist and sociologist Rogers Brubaker is always worth your while, and he doesn't disappoint in his piece here. He points to the fundamental fact of immigration, and coordinates that with the globalization of the manufacturing economy, which damaged established manufacturing networks and led to rising inequality within wealthy countries; but he notes that progressive parties were cowed by perceived political-economic crises in Keynesianism since the 1970s, and, as he puts it, under went a "neoliberal turn" which "left the field open" to ugly rabble-rousers:
The opening of national economies to immigrant labor is part of a broader set of economic transformations that have created opportunities for populists to speak in the name of “ordinary people” against “those on top” and against outside forces seen as threatening “our” jobs, “our” prosperity, and “our” economic security. The litany is familiar: sharp increases in inequalities, the regionally concentrated collapse of manufacturing jobs, the accelerating cross-border flows of goods, services, and investments as well as labor, and the shifting of risks and responsibilities to individuals through neoliberal modes of governance. But social-democratic parties did not seize the political opportunity created by these major economic shifts. Instead, their neoliberal turn in recent decades left the field open to other parties, on the right as well as the left, to advance populist claims to protect domestic jobs and welfare benefits.
You combine all this with the economic crisis of 2008-9 forward--the worst since the 1930s--and you have all the ingredients for the situation in which we find ourselves today.
Brubaker's account seems plausible to me. But he sort of loses the golden thread a bit by talking about all the institutional and structural changes that have happened. The golden thread, I think, is pluralism--here manifest in terms of white supremacy, in the EU manifest in terms of anti-immigrant suspicion. (Since much of the immigration bewailed in Brexit is of other white Europeans into the UK, I don't think it's enough to call it a defense of whiteness. It's actually worse than that--it's an even narrower form of racial supremacy than we have in the United States, though the animus is diluted by not being targeted against an obvious "other" already in place.) Brubaker's piece is a bit over-nuanced for me, and diffuses its impact by attending to a number of things without sufficiently prioritizing the crucial ones.
An example of someone doing that better is this piece by Pranab Bardhan, an economist at Berkeley. He hears the accusations against economics (Pankaj Mishra and his Age of Anger is his primary interlocutor in this piece), but he has what I think is a wider, and wiser, picture.
Economics actually can be a moderating force, as he points out:
Contrary to Mishra’s view, there is an intellectual tradition that suggests that economic interests can in fact tame human passions. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes writes, “Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunity for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement.” Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1977) has a more nuanced discussion of the relationship between interests and passions. However, both Keynes and Hirschman were talking about earlier times in Europe. Today, when the opportunities for money-making have opened up in countries such as China and India, passions are channeled by the ruling party in both countries into the service of a national aggrandizement that capitalist growth has at last made possible.
Let me just say that, as people who know me in reality (that is, who know me (but then again does anyone know anyone?)) know about me, I love Hirschman's stuff--he's terrific. And the vision that he offers in The Passions and the Interests is really worth everyone's attention. So Bardhan had me, not at hello, but at Hirschman.
But there's more good stuff here. For as Bardhan argues, I also think it is not simply material economic interests that are to blame for our current situation--though they clearly need to be critiqued, and reformed, boy do they need to be reformed; it is also though our in-group cohesion, and our out-group demonization, and our perceptions of how the "other" is treated, that is operative here.
Rousseau’s romantic search for community may be relevant to the present crisis. A common element of reactions across rich and poor countries is that the working class seems angrier about the cultural elite than about the financial elites who are the target of the left (incidentally, coming from Geneva, Rousseau himself felt like an outsider in the Parisian salons of high culture). For many populist supporters, the liberal elite’s lofty preaching of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism offends their sense of cultural rootedness in family, community, and nation, making them easy prey for the militant ethnic nationalism that is often the first refuge of demagogues. Likewise, liberal criticism of demagogues is often easily dismissed as elitist and anti-national. Meanwhile minorities and immigrants are demonized by populist leaders as obstacles to national unity; historical facts about the role those minorities and immigrants played in nation-building are not allowed to interfere with nationalist myths. As nineteenth-century French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan famously quipped, “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”
…
This anti-immigrant sentiment is part of a larger majoritarian perception of siege and victimhood, exacerbated by the majority community’s perception that it is now less secure or privileged than it was in the past. In widely-noted research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton about the “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol abuse among middle-aged whites in the United States, the authors document how the rising mortality rates of people with a high school degree or less for whites are now converging with those of similar less-educated blacks.
In India Muslims are on average socially and economically much worse off than Hindus, and yet Hindu resentments provide fuel for the right-wing resurgence. Hindus constitute about 80 percent of the population, while Muslims constitute a mere 13 percent, and yet the supposed higher fertility rates of Muslims is cited to stoke fears among Hindus about becoming outnumbered. Fearmongering about the threat of terrorism only adds to this. The traumatic history of Partition and the proximity of Muslim-majority Pakistan make Muslims an easy suspect. In the United States, Europe, and India, crime and violence are routinely attributed to minorities (Muslims, gypsies, Hispanics, blacks), and the blatant discrimination and ghettoization of these minority groups can often make such perceptions self-fulfilling.
In the United States, Europe, India, Turkey, and elsewhere, the perceived appeasement of minorities—which is assumed to be implicit in the liberal support for minority rights—fosters resentment amongst the majority, which find the liberal rhetoric of diversity and political correctness condescending if not outright threatening.
Now here's what he says that seems to me new, and even more worth hearing, and genuinely unsettling, to me. (This may well say as much about me as about his argument--perhaps I should say, "this is the first time I managed to see this in a piece I've read," which would grant that others were trying to scream it at me as well, but I just couldn't hear them.) He makes this further interesting point later, gently, in a way you may not notice, namely, that the tensions of in-group/out-group do not simply play among the "white working classes" of these communities. It may also apply to the "in-group" of liberal cosmopolitans as well.
Going back to Rousseau’s idea of the community, many people today believe that their basic values, as well as their nostalgia for a (false) golden past, are disrespected by a cosmopolitan elite whose liberalism prioritizes individual freedom over community bonding and traditional loyalties. In this sense, liberty and fraternity are clearly not always in harmony.
A deeper conflict in the conception of the individual may also be at stake here. In his recent book, On Human Nature (2017), the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton distinguishes between the liberal individual, self-possessed in her autonomous decisions, consent, contract, and trade, and the conservative individual who endows meaning to her life mainly through her identity in relation to a community with established traditions. If there is anything to this, then the traditional role of trade unions and other worker associations in linking up with neighborhoods and communities in local cultural and social activities becomes all the more important, beyond mere wage bargaining. Their role in sustaining politically the network of social insurance and protection is also crucial in keeping despondent workers away from demagogues.
In other words, populism has flourished precisely where the working class most vividly perceives the ignorant scorn of "liberal cosmopolitans" that disdains the objects of value they prioritize--in the US, family, religion, country, elsewhere family and perhaps class-identity, maybe country or local culture as well. Admittedly these objects of value are often defined, or so a liberal cosmopolitan like me will argue, in terms of some "out-group" whose stigmatism has come to play an important role in the affirmation of my in-group (I mean, at least we're not like those people over there.)
This strikes me as importantly true. Others have made the claim about "populism" as a bugbear of anti-pluralism, and I agree with them--most notably for me Jan-Werner Müller, from a classically liberal (in the Rawlsian, or maybe Arendtian, sense of liberal) way.
I wholly agree it is anti-pluralistic, but I can say that without feeling at all challenged on my own views, because after all I know what pluralism would be. But Bardhan writes in a way that also implicates me in the hostility to the other--in this case, the other of the white working class, say. To hear Müller talk, in the piece above I linked to, "elites" are the targets of abuse, the real victims. But I think "elites" like me are also victimizers, as any economic account (or the recent literature on "deaths of despair") would suggest. Here's a rule of thumb: any account that depicts its own most favored audience as purely victims ought to be suspected; this is as true about the white working class victimhood narrative as it is of the "liberal elites" victimhood narrative.
In a way this is like what Rogers Brubaker says in his piece, to which I linked above: that the danger we face is in thinking that his moment is dangerously special, and that we may be excused for thinking that we need something beyond "ordinary politics" to address it. As Brubaker points out, "the resonance of populist rhetoric depends on a claim to exceptionality, a claim to be fundamentally different from politics as usual." I can't tell you the number of times when I've felt like my rage or frustration at something going on in politics has risen in me, to be legitimated by (or reinforced by, and perhaps also to reinforce in return) a conviction that "this moment is a crisis and needs extraordinary action." Is it the case that polarization and apocalypticism go hand in hand?
I'm not yet convinced we are not facing a real crisis, but reading these pieces helped me think a bit differently than I had. Maybe they'll do the same for you.
(PS Bardhan's book Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India (Princeton University Press) looks really interesting, as well, by the way, as a solid survey of the economic present and future of China and India, focusing on "accountability failure" as a major problem in both countries, though differently manifested in each. I'll be checking that out too.)