Winking at World Historical Despair

Eight lateral thoughts on Trump's victory: power, delusion, courage, pain, danger, unlearning normality, isonomia, and hope.

It’s important to feel what we have to feel, but sometimes we don’t know what to feel.

That’s why we write - to take fuller possession of our experience, so that we learn what we feel, feel what we have learnt, and thereby know how to go on.

My first impulse today is to say: Get over yourself! It’s not that bad.

This voice says it is indulgent to care so much about the outcome of an election when there is so much else happening in your own life and in the world at large, you have other work to do and it’s not even your f***ing country. Get over yourself.

It. Is. Just. One. Election. Result. It’s not that bad that Trump has won the US Presidential Election, and likely controls all branches of the US government. It might even turn out to be good. Who knows?

I am grateful for that voice, and it should give us pause that many millions think something like that, but it does not ring altogether true. I feel that voice is there partly to protect me from the thought that this outcome is, in fact, unbelievably bad.

America’s predicament may not be as bad as Seth Abramsom seems to think it is, but if you are an undocumented worker facing deportation next year and separation from your children, or a Ukrainian fearing you will be forced to capitulate to your violent oppressor and disavow your identity and be subjugated in the name of peace; or a young woman who feels her body just became an object of state control; or anyone working to phase out fossil fuels in the name of ecological sanity, I can see why the outcome would seem suffocatingly bleak.

So I don’t want to pretend I know what the result means or offer false reassurance. And I doubt many have the stomach for an extended disquisition. So for those who are interested, here are eight thoughts that I hope might help to provide lateral perspective and perhaps save some of us from sinking into world historical despair. I’m going to start with the mystical, flirt with the metapolitical, and end with the comical.

1. There are powers higher than the US Presidency.

   This point is not about God, or President Xi in China, but it’s a good moment to back up and think about terrestrial power from a more celestial vantage point. At first, it will sound crazy, but electing Trump seems crazy too, and the key, very distantly inspired by Trump supporters, is to take the following perspective ‘seriously but not literally’ (while not injecting yourself with bleach).

   In her extraordinary book, The Eye of the Heart, Cynthia Bourgealt dedicates a chapter to ‘The Conscious Circle of Humanity’ which she describes as follows (p139):

There’s an old piece of Hasidic Folklore that claims that our world at any point in time is held in its planetary orbit by thirty six conscious human beings. They don’t know each other, and they don’t even know if they’re among the thirty-six. But the quality of their work, rising like incense into the earth’s atmosphere, creates around our fragile planet a sturdy bandwidth of protection, blessing and guidance.

Taking this idea literally is absurd (I think) but taking it seriously is reasonable for anyone who has ever felt protected by forces beyond the perceived material world. I know I have that way more than once - that sense of ‘someone looking out for me’ - and in recent days loved ones close to me have reported a similar sense of being protected in precarious contexts as if from beyond. So please hold the general idea in mind for a moment because Cynthia also says this (p144):

Western civilisation is perhaps expendable, but the biosphere certainly is not. We will either make the leap to the next level of conscious evolution - the so called ‘integral’ level or capacity to think from the whole - or we will wipe out a good part of a planetary legacy millions of years in the makng and in the process put the entire Ray of Creation at risk. And in such critical juncture points, the vigorous intervention of the conscious circle of humanity is not only a possibility; it is a virutal certainty. In the words of General Lowenhielm, we need only to “await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude.”

I am not sure what to make of that, but it felt timely to share it.

2. This election was a battle between two different flavours of delusion.

   I wanted Harris to win and thought that she would. She seemed likeable to me. The combination of warmth and self-possession, a love of good spicy food, charming dance moves, and a track record of fighting the good fight made her relatively appealing compared to the moral and intellectual vacuum that is Trump. And yet, if you listen to her closing speech at the Ellipse in DC, there is really nothing there - it’s an avalanche of cliches and platitudes, cheered on by an unthinking crowd desperate to believe in something.

   Harris is a neoliberal technocrat who was supported by a sclerotic Democratic party, an institution that holds the progressive mantle while being fundamentally corporate and conservative in nature. Harris offered more of the same, at a time when insight and transformation were called for. Those who lament Trump’s victory should also lament the absence of a powerful story of the present and vision of the future - that is an even bigger problem than Trump’s victory, and part of its basis, as argued for instance by Bruno Latour in Down to Earth.

3. Few things are as charismatic as moral courage, and Harris failed to show it.

   Harris did not kill anyone directly, but she is complicit in the destruction of Gaza which could only happen due to US weapons and diplomatic cover provided by an administration of which she was a leading part. Her campaign messaging coincided with the systematic destruction of part of a people and culture, also known as genocide.

   It is true that Harris made more noises of sympathy towards the ‘unconscionable’ killing of innocents in Palestine than Biden has. And she seemed to feel that the emphasis on supporting Israel no matter what was misplaced, and yes there are realpolitik challenges in speaking out against Israel before an election, and perhaps she planned to speak out more fully if she won.

   But when it was time to lead, she utterly failed.

   For many, myself included, watching events in Gaza unfold represented the nadir of liberal internationalism. When approximately 42,000 people are killed, and many more are maimed and orphaned, and all you’ve got is a kind of shrug and a vapid appeal to a principle of self-defence that has been abused, it’s a moral and political collapse. That collapse makes American international leadership look absurd now, if not horrific. For instance, the open society against closed society narrative that applies to why the US supports Ukraine in its defence against Russia completely collapses when you consider America’s inability or unwillingness to prevent Israel from conducting what many believe to be a genocidal assault on the people of Gaza. What’s the point of defending liberal democracy, if those seeking to lead it feel that cannot speak out against immoral and inhuman acts?

   I am not saying Harris lost the election because of Gaza as such, because clearly it was not on the minds of most voters and she lost decisively. It can be argued that it was the defining missed opportunity though.

   Instead of the simulated thinking, friendly vibes, and platitudes about unity and democracy that characterised her campaign, she missed the chance to sing her own song of conviction. We can’t be sure it would have ‘worked’ in electoral terms, but that would not have been the reason to do it anyway - she should have done it because it’s right. It is possible to bring people together with courageous moral leadership: “No, Israel, when I am President we will not fund your killing of women and children, your deliberate destruction of culture, your wilful starvation. Not on my watch.” Who knows what reaction there might have been, but history indicates that if you find the courage to tell the truth as you see it, the fetid forces of conventional wisdom are not unassailable after all.

4. Much of the pain felt today is symbolic.

   US Presidents are powerful, but they are not *that* powerful. It has been a while since we have lived in a Unipolar world, and within the US’s Federal System, there are limits to what a President can do. What hurts for many, I think, and why the election matters outside of the USA is that the President of the USA is still seen as the symbolic leader of the free world. What seems most shocking is that many millions chose this particular man to be that icon ‘ “This is your King?”…

   Perhaps that recognition is a kind of good news though, because it suggests that the bulk of the pain currently felt is grief for an ideal, rather than fear of particular consequences, which may be exaggerated.

5. Trump is dangerous but he is a sui generis authoritarian, not necessarily a fascist.

   Yes, there was a ban on Muslims entering the USA, and yes he denied a free and fair election and attempted an insurrection (and suggested that, you know, maybe we should inject ourselves with bleach). And yes he has narcissistic qualities and authoritarian tendencies, and he is surrounded by power-hungry ideologues and neo-Nazis with no allegiance to democracy. However, Trump himself, for all his very many faults, is one of a kind. The charge of fascism feels intellectually lazy, not because it is unjustified but because it lacks the specificity the singular Trump phenomenon calls for. There is a different kind of US-specific authoritarianism here that is informed by the American Dream, by social-media-generated news, by an alienating global economy, by a commercial culture with a weakness for macho showmanship. The challenge is to understand Trump with new language that is informed by anti-fascist thinking, yes, but also more particular, and more imaginative by far.

6. This probably is the decisive blow to what remained of ‘the liberal order’.

   People outside the US (myself included) continue to fail to fathom just how disillusioned many are with ‘the status quo’, ‘the system’, ‘the liberal elite’ etc.

   In 2016, many didn’t understand how Trump could appear preferable to Hilary. Harris, too, looked plausible and ‘normal’ enough, and she showed moments of excellence, including her only debate with Trump. However, for many, to appear normal while seeking to lead a broken system is just another way to look like you don’t understand that ‘normal’ is not quite the asset we think it is because more of the same feels to many like more of the same failure and poison. Harris represented the forces of continuity people did not only not want, but actually loathed and feared. It was probably a mistake to make the defence of liberal democracy central to the campaign (‘your fundamental rights’, ‘the last election’ etc) when many feel liberal democracy is broken and repeatedly failing to deliver.

   Liberalism has been on the ropes for a while, and as I indicated last week it has been complacent and hollowed out for too long, badly in need of reappraisal and renewal. It has taken about a decade for the message to sink in, but the idea that liberal democracy is somehow the default setting for a global order that would work for everyone if only they fell in line is clearly bankrupt now. It seems to me that the necessity to unlearn normality is quickening in a way that is painful and dangerous, but not altogether bad. This point speaks to the broader challenge of living in the metacrisis, of which Trump’s (re)election is just one feature of many.

7. We need to rediscover what it is about democracy that is meaningful to us personally and collectively and consider how to fight for that.

   Democracy risks becoming completely incoherent. Earlier this year, in the UK General Election, I spoiled my ballot for the first time because I didn’t feel I had anything I wanted to vote for except for a change in the voting system. It is difficult to want to fight for democracy when what it yields is a choice between two candidates that most people don’t want. I can’t remember the source, and it may be the numbers are exaggerated, but at some point in the commentary last night I heard of a poll that 85% of the electorate wished they had a different choice from Trump v Harris. Maybe the issue here is that representative democracy as such has run out of steam, and we need a more wholehearted return to forms of deliberative and participatory democracy.

   The idea of universal franchise, one person one vote, took centuries to achieve and remains a good one in principle; and yet most who believe in that feature of democracy take two things as givens that are often absent, or as constants when they are variables - namely a free press and an educated citizenry. I think that means if you really care about democracy (and it’s worth asking why exactly you care about it) the way to fight for it may not be through elections but through media innovation to contend with widespread misinformation and a new kind of education. In my own small way, I like to think Perspectiva is doing that now.

   Could it be that our attachment to democracy is militating against the more fundamental things we value, including meaningful choice, freedom from the abuse of power, and wiser governance? It’s too deep an issue for now, but Michel Bauwens suggests what this moment may call for is not democracy as such, but what Kojan Karatani calls Isonomia. Karatani’s argument, in The Structure of World History (2014) points to a form of governance that has many democratic elements including a deeper commitment to political equality, but not the centralisation and class conflict that appears to be baked into our current democratic systems.

   I am not there yet, but what if the answer to the threat of fascism is not better liberalism but something more like intelligent anarchism?

8. Maybe we need ‘Holidays from Hope’.

   Those of a broadly progressive orientation should learn to be kinder to themselves by taking regular hope vacations and sabbaticals, where we allow ourselves to feel hopelessness truly, madly and deeply, before returning to the recognition that there is meaningful work to do after all. I’m partly joking, but hope is painful, and moments like this are hard. People are in pain not because all is lost, but precisely because it is not.

   I’ll leave you then with John Cleese in the film Clockwise putting it so memorably:

   “It’s not the despair, I can stand the despair, it’s the hope!”