The News: One of Those Years

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Rather than the year that was, in the waning days of 2023, let’s talk about the year to come.

2024 seems like one of those years like 1848 and 1914 and 1939 that can’t help but be a turning point for humanity, destined to be remembered if anyone’s left to do the remembering.

In the worst-case scenario, perhaps it won’t be until 2025 that the consequences really begin to unfold, but even then, I think 2024 would likely be given the iconic credit in the years that follow.

In democracies all over the world, the inability of standard centrist-technocrat governments to deliver anything like vision to the residents of their countries is opening up space for far-right ethnonationalist rulers who lack the capacity to manage state administrations in their present form but who do have some kind of consistent social-cultural vision to guide their actions.

That was the story for first-wave fascist regimes that gained power at the end of the first third of the 20th Century as well. They didn’t really understand how to run a government once they came to power. (The myth that ‘the trains ran on time’ under the Fascists and National Socialists in Italy and Germany is oddly persistent: those regimes were not efficient, precise or highly coordinated.) The authoritarian states that survived World War II got better at deferring their internal managerial failures, usually via brutal repression of any internal dissent, or in a few cases like apartheid South Africa via extreme bureaucratic-rational-repression, but all of them showed their internal brittleness over time.

21st Century modernity has taken longer to grind to a point of stasis and failure in liberal democratic societies, but we seems to have arrived at a global inflection point that can’t just be deferred through managerial incrementalism and technocratic forms of common sense. Argentina’s existing political class couldn’t manage the economy well enough, and Milei is the consequence. In Hungary, Orban has become extraordinarily successful at biting the EU hand that feeds him, remaking all of his failures into externalities that in turn justify his continued re-election while also staying afloat on the funding that his supra-national alliance can’t stop feeding to him. (A trick that thoroughly Republican state governments in the US mastered in tandem with him.) The Congress Party in India vanished into the dwindling fecklessness of a failed dynasty and Modi stepped in with an actual direction for his country to go towards—little matter that it was the direction of authoritarianism and oppression of religious minorities. Italy has put a near-fascist in power, and France teeters on the edge as their centrist boy-king founders. Labour in the UK looks to have a shot because the Tories have ground their own country down to a smoldering wreck, but never bet on Labour’s ability to lose an election they ought to win—the only better bet is that they’ll fuck it up after winning by adopting timorously pseudo-Tory policies.

And then there’s the United States, where perhaps 40% of the electorate stares catastrophe in the face and happily embraces it. It’s impossible to think that Trump’s supporters are under any illusion any longer about what follows if he wins: they fear they’d lose the country entirely if we just went on muddling through with competent centrism and a more-or-less liberal majority sociocultural bent, so they’d rather burn the whole thing down. If November 2024 brings a Trump victory—perhaps even after a criminal conviction—a great deal else plainly follows. An American withdrawal from NATO, an end to support for Ukraine, a renewed economic war against China, widespread deportations of undocumented residents and an end to birthright citizenship. Very likely the creation of a national accreditation infrastructure intended to destroy or damage higher education, the use of the justice system to punish political enemies. Back in 2015, I wrote on Facebook that we were on the slope to show trials, which several people in my friends network thought was a ridiculous exaggeration. I hope they’ve re-evaluated.

Beyond that, likely worse both in terms of outcomes and outrages, a compounding cascade of fundamental transformations in the way the world works.

The problem is that defeating Trump by whatever margin is not likely to decisively turn back the danger. The currents in the world-system cannot be diverted simply through sensible economic management and the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo. The Washington Consensus has been a zombie for a decade now, it’s just that the body parts are starting to decay right off of it as it shambles along.

In the absence of some countervailing vision, if it’s not 2024 it’ll be 2028 or 2032 when the worst happens in the U.S. or elsewhere. Social democracy—or something lightly non-democratic that’s adjacent to it—plainly does offer a successful counter but somehow it’s not enough despite its plausibility and achievability in much of Europe and in pockets elsewhere around the globe. The only hope I see technocrats and liberal-centrists holding on to is that somehow authoritarianism will shit the bed badly enough because of its inescapable control-freakery and power-madness that they’ll be pushed away either by their own governments or by their populations. But we have danced this dance before: give a dictator a taste of power and most of the time they will declare a war, foment a crusade, murder their own people, before they let themselves be pushed out due to more ordinary administrative failures.

The stress points in 2024 further decrease any margin for error—and none of them can be handled with little more than sensible competence. AI, climate change, brutally pointless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, a vast shadow economy that is beyond the regulatory reach of any political power: all of them have the potential to push through the entire world, dropping it into some fundamental new kind of disequilibrium.

The thing is, in 2024 I think the mass of humanity will remain what it basically has been all along in modernity: full of decency, ready for justice, open to change. Sorry for their trespasses, hoping not to be trespassed against. Wanting to just live their lives and be left well enough alone. If the powerful could only manage to keep things running well enough for everyone, share some wealth and leave space for the vast rest of their societies, I think most people would return the favor and leave them to scheme and jostle amongst themselves. I wish it was just a moral failing of power and that would could wish reasonably enough for a better class of millionaires and ministers. But there’s something systematically rotten in the world we’ve made and it will take something with systematic energy to push things to being good enough for the world to go on being enough for everyone, as it plainly can be. We have the tools, just no hands worthy of using them and no plan to build what they’re capable of making.

I don’t know what that systematic counter is. I can’t see it. I’m sure that some of the old ways of naming or imagining that counter-balance aren’t going to do it, but that doesn’t help much. This philosopher is stuck only interpreting; that alone makes me certain both that a good change is needed and that otherwise a bad change is gonna come. 2024 seems like the year where the latter seems ready to come down the rails into the station, unless people more imaginative and daring than I am can switch the engine onto a new track. Never have we needed the train not to run on time more than this coming year.