Archive | charismatic resilience RSS feed for this section

Regressive Populism and the Resilience Imperative: Evading Global Challenges

10 Apr

[Prefatory Note: We are living in an alarming period in world history where the ecological balance of the planet is in jeopardy due to anthropocentric negligence and malfeasance. As well, existing geopolitical structures are beset by tensions that threaten to repeat the terrible experiences of global warfare with an increasing danger of recourse to nuclear weapons on a large scale, bringing about ‘a nuclear winter,’ which threatens to be a near extinction event for the human species as well as many animal and plant species. It is by any reasonable calculation a ‘planetary state of emergency’ yet the behavior patterns around the world exhibit almost no adaptive ingenuity and fail to engender the political ambition to put aside anachronistic concerns about strategic clashes of geopolitical actors to focus on these urgent 21st century challenges that are trending toward catastrophe.

I am posting my foreword to a recent book on the rise of ultra-nationalist populism around the world by the distinguished British author and historian, Deepak Tripathi.  What is depicted in the book is emblematic of the populist and inter-governmental myopia that has become a menacing characteristic of the global setting. I highly recommend reading this book, which can be obtained from the usual online book sellers, published in later 2023 by Springer in Europe. Although anachronistic and regressive leadership imperils the human future, it is the mass appeal of autocrats that deepens the array of challenges grouped together under the various failures of populism: THE RESILIENCE IMPERATIVE: Reimaging Global Populism.]

[Prefatory Note: We are living in an alarming period in world history where the ecological balance of the planet is in jeopardy due to anthropocentric negligence and malfeasance. As well, the geopolitical structures are beset by tensions that threaten to repeat the terrible experiences of global warfare with an increasing danger of recourse to nuclear weapons on a large scale, bringing about ‘a nuclear winter,’ which threatens to be a near extinction event for the human species as well as many animal and plant species. It is by any reasonable calculation a ‘planetary state of emergency’ yet the behavior patterns around the world exhibit almost no adaptive ingenuity and fail to engender the political ambition to put aside anachronistic concerns to focus of these urgent 21st century challenges that are trending toward catastrophe.

I am posting my foreword to a new book on the rise of ultra-nationalist populism around the world by the distinguished British author and historian, Deepak Tripathi.  What is depicted in the book is emblematic of the populist and inter-governmental myopia that has become a menacing characteristic of the global setting. I highly recommend reading this book, which can be obtained from the usual online book sellers, published this month by Springer in Europe.]

Foreword to Deepak Tripathi’s Populism: Weaponizing for Power and Influence (2023)

We are living at a time when liberal democracy has lost much of its charm. Reflecting back on 1989 perspectives highlighted by the collapsing Berlin Wall it was not supposed be that way. On the contrary, there was a triumphalist optimism rampant in the West that liberal style democracy (wedded to a market driven world economy) was the wave of the post-Cold War global future, typified by Francis Fukuyama’s End of History: The Last Man (1993). A blazing torch for such a democratizing future was carried by two American presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who despite coming from supposedly opposed mainstream parties, both championed ‘democracy’ as the path forward for all peoples living on the planet, and especially those in the Global South. To be sure there were more pessimistic voices who were making their voices heard, most prominently, that of Samuel P. Huntington with his conflict-laden view of political life after the Cod War, captured by his arresting phrase, ‘clash of civilizations,’ supposing that the struggle of the future would be ‘the West against the rest,’ [Huntington, Samuel P., “Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (1993) Another grim voice gaining attention in that period was the dark forebodings of Robert Kaplan whose historic sense was preoccupied with chaos and disorder. [The Coming Anarchy (2000)].

Bill Clinton, as the U.S. president in the 1990s fashioned and promoted a doctrine of ‘enlargement’ that justified tilting American foreign policy in a pro-democracy direction, claiming also that a democratizing world would inevitably lead to world peace as history supposedly documents that democracies do not fight wars against one another. What was called ‘the strategy of enlargement’ was set forth most influentially set forth by Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, who was an unconditional advocate of promoting democracy after the Soviet collapse. In his words, “America’s core concepts, democracy and market economics, are more broadly accepted than ever before. We have arrived at neither the end of history nor a clash of civilizations, but a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity, and we must not waste it.” [Lake, “The Four Pillars, Emerging ‘Strategy of Enlargement,’” Chirstian Science Monitor, Sept 29, 1993]

Then George W. Bush came along to push the same line with more ideologically self-serving language, most notably in the introduction to the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise… We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.” Such a statement still reflects the ideological orientation of that time, but if uttered today its lack of plausibility would make it seem like an emanation from a quaintly out of touch worldview. When I first read this prideful utterance by Bush back in 2002 it struck me then as a perfect example of an ideological framing of imperial hubris. Now I regard it as a dangerous confirmation of the delusional ideas that held sway in the misguided efforts after the Cold War to construct  viable and equitable arrangements supportive of the global public good without paying heed to giving greater independent authority to the UN or according increasing respect for international law.

More than two decades after Bush, Deepak Tripathi ventures to tell us quite a different story about the political tides sweeping across the world in a manner that exposes the fragility of even those political arrangements that had seemed the most stable and deeply rooted within liberal democracies such as the sanctity of elections and the peaceful transfer of power from one leader to the next. Beyond this issue of systemic precariousness, the extraordinary rise of China, and Asia more generally, in a period when the West stagnated, drew into severe question the assertion that ‘free enterprise’ was an indispensable foundation of political sustainability and economic prosperity for all sovereign states with its boastful implication that the West had developed a superior model of economic and political development that all should follow.

Indeed, Tripathi’s stunningly comprehensive and historically grounded survey of populist politics, whether from right or left, or from above or below, articulates a quite different narrative from the earlier post-Cold War perspectives that attempted to interpret the future of politics within states and their international spillover effects of the transitory, if globally reverberating, Soviet implosion in 1992. Rather than the transformative development that the West welcomed, this spectacular, if temporary end of Cold War geopolitics, resulted in fundamental changes in the structures and processes of an evolving world order. It could have been different if the victors had seized the historical opportunity to make the world safer and more equitable by finally eliminating nuclear weapons and constructing more communally organized institutional arrangements. Above all, this would have meant strengthening the UN—its capabilities, responsiveness to human suffering and societal vulnerabilities, cooperative and equitable approaches to climate change and natural disasters. But this window of opportunity was never opened. It was shut down rather quickly by the militarist combination of predatory capitalism and a revitalized geopolitical ambition, which failed to address global scale challenges that posed dire threats to human security.

What Tripathi brilliantly shows is that such a historical context gave rise to populism rather than the expected expansion of democratic patterns of governance by a variety of populist moves at the level of the sovereign state. Instead of addressing problems by the aggrieved even in rich and powerful societies through the social protection of its own poor and vulnerable, as well as responding in an effective and equitable manner to climate change, the U.S. and several European countries became preoccupied with unwanted migrants diluting territorial nationalism and meeting Asian, mainly the Chinese challenge, with new modalities of militarist containment rather than enhanced competitive prowess and a genuine advocacy of inclusive multilateralism. Moderation and pluralism associated with the practice of democracy cast aside, mass frustration leading to severe inequalities, polarization, resentment, and pointed fingers, with the left blaming elites and the entrenched forms of public order while the right blamed overreaching and irresponsible government that served the interests of globalized elites (Wall Street) rather than ordinary people. the soul of the nation. Such polarization gave rise of extremist interpretations, movements, and leaders usually seeking vindication and legitimacy by claiming to be the voice of ‘the people.’ This political mood allowed demagogues and authoritarian figures to flourish, often by proposing snake oil solutions that promised unhinged governance guided by abstract invocations of ‘the will of the people,’ casting aside in fits of populist fury the sanctity of constitutional constraints on the exercise of state power associated with checks and balances, the sanctity of civil and political rights, the rule of law, and a host of other populist tropes.

Although populism is presently spreading its around the world at the expense of more moderate democratic approaches to governance, although not without such partial countertendencies as the defeat of Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump in America illustrate. Perhaps, partly to reassure us that populism is no more of a permanent fixture than was democracy seemed to be at the turn of the century, Tripathi surveys the political development of the past two centuries in the major regions of the world to educate readers by populism is not new and always diverse as expressive of the particularities of national, regional, and global contexts. Populism is part of the fabric of long dominant sovereign states, including the U.S., Russia, and India, partly less so of China. This helps explain the prevalence of autocratic and radical reform movements throughout Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia. On the one side, dictatorial populists of the left as Juan Peron and Chavez who serve workers and peasants. But there are also leaders such as Trump who come along with promises ‘to drain the swamp’ of corrupt bureaucrats that are crafting policies for the benefit of special interests, supposedly standing up for the people against the alleged encroachments of globalists, migrants, and ‘terrorists.’ And others like Boris Johnson who championed Brexit as a way of restoring pride and economic vitality to the British nation. Johnson mobilized ‘the people’ by promising to make the nation great again, by various means including disentanglement from the EU, and presumably other forms of internationalism.

The provocative title chosen by Tripathi suggests to me acute anxiety about past and present unleashing of populism. The idea of ‘weaponizing’ politics portends both intense internal conflict and a free hand to act beyond the law on the part of a government leader who enjoys the confidence of an enraged people, prepared to follow along rants on paths that lead to repression, intolerance, and violent conflict. If this is correct, then this book amounts to a warning to be heeded by all who value restraints on political leadership and state power, favor rationality of public discourse, support the repudiation of wild conspiracy theories, and discredit searches for scapegoats upon whom lay blame for the misfortunes of the nation and its people.

Tripathi is disciplined and knowledgeable enough not to project populist trends into the future. As I read him, however, he does appear to believe that populism will not get the job done to the satisfaction of those oriented toward either the balancing of national interests against human interests or against global public goods as the 21st century unfolds. What makes this book so timely and essential reading for an understanding of the world is the conceptualization of populism its depiction as a worldwide phenomenon emergent at times of acute social, economic, and political stress.

Tags: , ,

Parallel Universes: Vietnam and Palestine

26 Nov

 

 

Not surprisingly, my sixth visit to Vietnam stirred many memories, among them, a recognition of the parallels between the Vietnamese and Palestinian experiences, two peoples who have meant so much to me over the course of my adult lifetime. I visited Hanoi in 1968 in the midst of the American war that was devastating the country and its population, causing more than three million deaths and deliberately injuring the environment and its human surrounding by using vast quantities of Agent Orange, containing the highly toxic chemical Dioxin. Agent Orange was being used to defoliate large areas of the countryside in the South as a tactic against revolutionary Vietnamese forces who were taking advantage of the wooded countryside to mount their attacks. The legacy of Agent Orange continues grimly to remind people of the war, giving rise to anguished societal suspicions of current contamination that seems confirmed by the continuing occurrence of birth deformities in certain provinces that far exceed normal statistical expectations. The Vietnamese mention this ongoing tragedy in muted tones as the government worries that it might hurt Vietnamese plans to increase their exports of agricultural products. It is part of the present atmosphere in which the war/peace preoccupations that I encountered when I visited Vietnam during the war have now been replaced by according the highest policy priority to economic growth and poverty reduction.

 

The Vietnam/Palestine parallel should not be understood as a claim of similarity. The two experiences are each highly distinctive, reflecting many particular features of the cultural, historical economic, and political experience of each country, as well as the specificities of relations to their regional neighborhood and global setting. At the same time these two peoples do share defining experiences of prolonged victimization intertwined with bitter resistance struggles because their desired national narrative collided with the geopolitical ambitions and commitments of the United States. In Vietnam the United States assumed responsibility for a colonial war already lost once by France in 1954, and pursued it with almost unrestrained fury for more than a decade before renouncing the quest in 1975, and slinking home in thinly disguised defeat. The supposed stakes of the conflict for the United States in Vietnam were mainly measured and justified in the ideological currency of the Cold War, holding the line in Asia against Communism after ‘the loss of China.’ According to the principal justification for the war, Vietnam was an Asian domino, which if it fell to national liberation forces, would lead to a rapid spread of Communism to Vietnam’s neighbors, which was then interpreted in Washington to mean the expansion of the Chinese sphere of influence.

 

Of course, the ideological and geopolitical motivations were packaged, as usual, with sleazy propaganda about the defense of freedom and the protection of South Vietnam against aggression from the North. This imposed division of Vietnam was itself a figment of the last stage of the Western colonial imaginary that tried to make the world believe that borders of geopolitical convenience took precedence over the the fundamental right of self-determination, which reflected the organic unities of history, tradition, and national identity. Eventually, as in most other anti-colonial struggles the national movement eventually prevailed during the period after 1945, enjoying in Vietnam the benefits of inspired political, military, and ideological leadership in the persons of Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and Le Duan, and a historical tradition of many centuries of success in defending national territory against foreign invaders, especially the Chinese. What is more, not only were the Vietnamese strengthened by this historical tale of victory. They were equally proud and sustained by an extraordinary record of post-conflict reconciliation with prior enemies that many other governments and societies could do well to heed. Political leaders in Hanoi enjoyed telling foreign visitors during the war how the Vietnamese prepared a farewell banquet for their Chinese intruders once they opted for peace, and decided to return home with the obvious implication that if the Americans stopped the war, friendship could follow, not recrimination and bitterness.

 

Never did I understand better the Communist slogan that our enemy is the government not the people than when I came to Vietnam in 1968 as an American peace activist. What I felt with a depth that could not be staged was the genuineness of these sentiments, then strongly associated with the teachings and beliefs of Ho Chi Minh. This attitude, so different than what I had experience as a child growing up during World War II, was epitomized by Ho’s appreciation of the American Declaration of Independence that Vietnamese school children were made to read and think about about throughout a war in which American planes were daily dumping tons of explosives on the villages and towns of an almost defenseless people. I remember driving in the beautiful Vietnamese countryside during the visit and being told by a government official that the driver’s entire family had been recently killed by a bombing strike, but that if an American plane were to attack us now he would risk his life, if necessary, to save yours. I felt moved at the time because it seemed so sincere, and consistent with all that I felt during my two weeks in the country at a time of its great national hardship, including shortages of food and medicine. The Vietnamese even in these dire circumstances were ready to give so much more than I was capable of giving!

 

My experience with the people of Palestine, whether living under occupation, as a minority in Israel, or in refugee camps, or in a global diaspora has many equivalent moving moments, maybe even more that were accompanied by tears either of grief or laughter. Both peoples exhibit resilience of will, virtue, love, and a lively comedic sense of reality that exceeds what seems imaginable. Beyond this, in the case of the Palestinian people their struggle continues to be maintained against seemingly overwhelming odds if the calculus of ‘political realism’ is to be trusted, which never seems to lose credibility no matter how often it errs. There are crucial differences between the principal adversary facing the Vietnamese and the Palestinians. It is this subjectivity of the oppressive forces that is not widely enough appreciated. Both the French and Americans, although investing heavily in their respective wars, always had a Plan B, a metropole to which they could retreat from Vietnam if the cost of the overseas campaign became too high.

 

For the Israelis, although many Jews as individuals do hold a second passport, there is no Plan B, no homeland other than that established by the Zionist settler colonial undertaking from its inception toward the end of the 19th century. These Zionist high stakes help explain the sense of justification with regard to the dispossession and suffering of the Palestinian people. What the Israelis may, however, be forced to consider in the future, if adverse pressures from the combination of Palestinian national resistance and global solidarity initiatives becomes threatening enough to make attractive to Israelis the choice of Plan C, that is, ‘a just peace’ based on the equality of the two peoples.

 

Such a drastic shift of Israeli objectives would necessitate both rolling back the idea and mechanisms of an exclusionary Jewish state, that is, abandoning the biblical vision of Israeli Jews occupying the whole of ‘the promised land’ of Palestine and then dismantling the apartheid structures to sustain control over the Palestinian people as a whole. At this point a just peace seems such an unlikely scenario as to invite responses of ‘utopian’ or ‘impossible’ to any suggested course along these lines. Yet history has its ways of undermining oppressors, making the impossible happen. Israelis would do well to ponder their future before supposing that they can subjugate the Palestinian people indefinitely. These reflections should include the awareness that the Palestinians, like Israeli Jews as a collectivity also have no Plan B (and few second passports!). The Israeli self-serving contention that since Palestinians are ‘Arabs’ they could and should give up their quest for a sovereign Palestine, and be content with lives in the Arab world. Palestinians, as might be expected, connect their aspirations with their connections to Palestine, and would be no more content or secure if moving to Arab countries than Israeli Jews would be to live in a Western country, in fact, less so.

 

Most Palestinian leaders have long seemed ready to negotiate their versions of a Plan C, which contains the proviso that it must give concrete meaning to the affirmation of an ‘equality of rights.’ True, Hamas might seem reluctant to endorse a full fledged Plan C, at least at the outset, but their leaders too during the past decade have been seeking an escape from the treadmill of perpetual violence, and if Israeli leaders showed comparable good faith, a long term accommodation would seem attainable, beneficial to both peoples, and allowing both sides to feel comfortable with distinct interpretations of what was agreed upon, a zone of ambiguity that lawyers are very good about delineating so that differences are neutralized rather than resolved. More specifically, Hamas would not be made to legitimize Israel in the process of normalizing relations, and accepting the fact of its existence as a country.

 

During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson once referred to Vietnam as a tenth-rate Asian power, making it seem as if a miracle would be required for the Vietnamese to achieve victory. Many military historians are still at a loss in their attempt to offer an understanding of the outcome of the conflict, given the economic and military disparities between the adversaries. The Vietnam War, especially after the illusions of an American victory were destroyed by the Tet Offensive in 1968, became too politically costly in blood and treasure to sustain, although think tank hawks never let go of their insistence that ‘defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory’ or alternatively, the insidious suggestion that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms’ (that is, by TV coverage, especially of dead Americans returning home in body bags and coffins). Such explanations amount to Orientalist denials of Vietnamese agency, implying the impossibility that such backward military technology could prevail when matched against the unlimited quantities of hyper-modern equipment available to United States armed forces.

 

For several years, extreme supporters of Israel have been urging the world to move on by accepting the reality that Israel has won, the Palestinians have lost, and regardless of feeling about the merits of the Palestinian struggle it has become one more lost cause. Daniel Pipes, long a Zionist zealot, has formalized this ‘game over’ diplomacy by using an NGO under his influence, the Middle East Forum to promote ‘a victory caucus’ in both the United States and Israel with the participation of members of the U.S. Congress and Israeli Knesset. There is something discordant about such triumphalist posturing. It doesn’t fit comfortably with the furious efforts of Israeli lobbies around the world to discredit the BDS campaign as ‘the new anti-Semitism’ or with the increasing momentum of the Palestinian global solidarity movement that has increasingly troubled Israeli think tanks, and given rise to heavily financed campaigns to punish anti-Israeli activists throughout the world. Given these realities, it seems to me that the relevant comparison seems South Africa’s about face, and not Vietnam’s victory. Apartheid South Africa also appeared to the world securely entrenched until its shocking moment of self-engineered collapse in the early 1990s at a time when even dreamers did not envision a peaceful transition to a post-apartheid reality.

 

Without counting on dreams and dreaming, we who care about a just future for both peoples need to realize it will depend on work, sacrifice, and above all, struggle. Dreams don’t become the new reality without the dedication of a people brave and creative, and helped by the inspirational effects on friends and supporters. This blessing of empowering and charismatic resilience is the core identity of the Vietnamese and the Palestinian people, their point of most profound convergence.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,