American journalism is nationally parochial. It’s hard to say whether that’s a reflection of American temperament or a cause of it. Whichever it is, that makes it harder for many Americans to see where their story is part of a bigger global pattern, whether it’s our history or the events we’ve lived through. When intellectuals complain of “American exceptionalism”, this is what they mean to put a pin on.
The United States is different in some important ways, or it has only a few similar counterparts. On guns and gun culture, there used to be some resemblances to Australia, but the Australians fixed that. As a settler society that grew into a nation with a sense of identity that at least potentially included all later immigrants and accepted that there was no primordial connection between national identity and the land itself (well, there was, but the settlers did their best to kill or subjugate the people entitled to make that claim), the US takes a somewhat different narrative approach to describing national belonging. (Something that a substantial white minority is now fixated on trying to repudiate entirely.)
The ways in which the potential end of American constitutional democracy is arriving, possibly as soon as next year’s Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Harper, certainly feel exceptional. Americans who visit Western Europe often comment on how old everything feels, but that’s substantially an illusion whether we’re talking built landscapes or the sociopolitical structures all around. The United States is one of the oldest continuous polities in the contemporary world, even though you could make an argument that it was only with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that it fully lived into what its Constitution set out—and thus with the Supreme Court’s invalidation of most of that legislation, began to close out that brief achievement. The revelations of the Jan. 6th Committee do feel like something new and worse, that a sitting president came within a hair’s breadth of carrying out a plan to overthrow his own democracy and take power through something like martial law. Moreover, the consequences of the United States transforming so fundamentally politically and socially are exceptionally consequential for the rest of the world—a United States where a conservative minority has effectively seized political power by some means (rather like the National Party in South Africa after the 1948 election) is going to be a US in profound internal turmoil and will no longer be able to serve as an economic or military backstop to the global system as it has for much of the last century.
At the same time, what’s happening in the United States has very strong connections to the political and social steering currents shaping the rest of the world. A few of those connections may be directly causal—far right American culture and thought is having a major influence on formerly fringe political opinion elsewhere, big American consultancies like McKinsey are sometimes involved in stirring up electoral conflicts elsewhere, and so on. I think more that it’s just that the U.S. is being acted upon by convergent trends and forces. Most crucially, the nearly unconstrained flow of capital in the post-Cold War global economy has produced transnational forms of accelerating inequality and unprecedented concentrations of wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller set of individuals whose holdings, identities and activities are hidden behind a maze of legal organizations and forms as well as secretive protections and obfuscations. Whether you live in a country (or region of a country) that has substantially deindustrialized in the past four decades or one where new industrial production has grown, you likely have little sense of security for yourself or your family. All that is solid melts into air every day now, and the overflowing flagons of extreme wealth sop and spill over into extravagances, into bizarre valuations and ponzi schemes, into hidden forms of control and ownership that can’t be confronted or regulated in most national economies.
Just about everywhere, national populations feel lost. Most of the promises of modernity have been broken. Almost no one is building monumental new structures or rolling out new initiative to improve life for everyone. Nothing seems trustworthy anywhere. Most people talking about dramatic technological breakthroughs are trying to sell something, scam someone.
And the politicians seem everywhere to either be diminished and meek leaders who mostly take their orders from an off-stage army of big money funders, political consultants, think-tank technocrats, and managerial bureaucrats, or they are volatile sociopaths who speak loudly and have tiny hands. The big talkers at least seem to believe in leadership, in power, but they are chimeras. Half of what they believe in is their personal vainglory and the other half is a reactionary vision of national purification, of scapegoating. They scarcely care about whether the post-1945 national and international order is a goose that laid many golden eggs, because most of the big talkers have enough of a hoard for themselves and because they think it would be better to kill the goose rather than try to get back to a more even distribution of its laying. Donald Trump has cousins all around the planet, in every national politics: Narendra Modi, Jacob Zuma, Viktor Orban, Marine Le Pen, Jair Bolsanaro, Rodolfo Hernandez Suarez. Some have won elections, some have captured their states, some are contending for power. A few early harbingers appeared here and there: Silvio Berlusconi was much mocked outside of Italy, but now plainly seems a forerunner of things to come.
Among their number, indeed, a stand-out in the crowd, Boris Johnson.
In many electoral systems, these figures all stand out for speaking boldly, crudely, directly to the resentments and grudges that major proportions of the national population have been stewing in since the 1960s—but that stew has everywhere had the temperature turned up underneath it by globalization in the last thirty years. They all flirt with (and sometimes openly embrace) authoritarianism. But unlike the fascists of a century ago, there isn’t much of an electoral or even movement left in many countries that can match their presence in public culture. E.g., there may be a left or an opposition in many nations, but it doesn’t push forward a political class who can speak with equal intensity, urgency, volatility, charisma or appeal. (There are exceptions, certainly, especially in Latin American politics. But mostly I think this generalization holds.) To some extent, that’s because the opposition either identifies with and treasures a technocratic governmental order and is attached to the fruits of globalization (and hence is ill-positioned to speak candidly and vividly about its consequences) or it is still stuck with the Old New Left’s historical structures.
So, to take Boris Johnson, a posh twit who long ago learned that if he played the fool, he might be forgiven his poshness by political constituencies that he’d need to move to the pinnacle of political power. He’s had the good fortune to be opposed by a Labour Party that first fell into the yawning political abyss of the cynical calcuation of “Third Way” politics and lost all of its passion and authenticity in that fall and then got taken with a harshly unyielding Old Old Leftist who also had virtually no sense of how to cultivate strong personal ties with his own leadership team. And Johnson had the further good fortune—one might say that he has been watching and waiting for such fortune to present itself—of being surrounded by a pack of indecisive managers, assistant Iagos, rich kids for whom the prospect of further laddish corruption and sexual misconduct must feel as distractingly enticing as Augustus Gloop would feel on being locked in the candy store one night, and the astonishing spectacle of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s transcendent ridiculousness. Much as Donald Trump had the good fortune to be running in 2015 against Republicans who sounded as inauthentic and pre-programmed as any Democrat and who looked on in dull, gasping surprise while he emasculated them on stage in a series of debates. Johnson, Trump, Bolsanaro, etc. were helped a great deal simply be seeming to be something different than the familiar pack of grade-school bullies, Harvard and Oxbridge graduates pretending to like pork rinds and mushy peas, the lesser heirs of posh old-money families, and low-grade sociopaths that they were surrounded by. And they’ve accentuated that sense of difference by recruiting a whole new pack of fanatics, molesters, icily determined racists, religious zealots and straight-up psychopaths to elbow aside the old party faithful.
This is where the question of structure and agency rises to the fore most sharply in our global political moment. Johnson has survived (at least as of this morning) despite a lifelong dedication to being a flagrant and unrepentant liar (has anyone ever apologized in public with less sincerity than Johnson?). He’s demonstrated a finely-honed taste for the most acute personal administrative and political incompetence that his party has managed to display in the last two decades. Is that because his laddish buffoonery so smartly tweaks the hearts of his fellow citizens—why, he’s just like that bloke I know, right?—or because the alternatives are exactly the same only with better hair and better-kept personal secrets?
You could say that about a lot of the Class of 2022, whatever we want to call them—populists, proto-fascists, kleptocrats, baby-steps authoritarians, far-right ethnonationalists, world-wreckers. The politics they inhabit is a politics that makes their personalities highly visible and the specific semantic character of their personality-inflected performances and speeches seemingly peculiar or distinctive. Johnson and Trump are both compulsive liars who surround themselves with the worst people they can find, but they’re also different in some interesting ways. By all accounts, Johnson has been aiming at the Prime Ministership all of his life, and once he got there, he really wanted to be the Winston Churchill of his times. But he’s spent so much time being a circus clown that he can’t wipe off the pancake make-up or find any pants to wear besides the baggy ones with the balloons on them. Plus he’s got nothing left in his circus besides clowns: the lion-tamers and acrobats took off a long time ago. The only thing Trump has ever wanted is to be the center of attention. It took Barack Obama mocking him to really turn him towards running for President (well, that, and maybe needing to keep ahead of his potential creditors by finding a new con to run).
Except that maybe it’s no accident or individual circumstance that they came forward when they did. It’s hard to imagine Trump running for President in 2000 or 2008 and winning or even getting close. It’s hard to imagine Johnson making his big move before he did a practice run at being the Head Fool as London’s Mayor. It’s not just their personal trajectories, though. It’s the moving of the tectonic plates of our global political cultures. We had to get to the point where it was completely normal to be a political leader who openly lusts for personal power, who lies compulsively and easily about everything under the sun, and who is so uninterested in the consequences of their governance that they’ll back anything that gets some hoots and hollers from their own special political base of deplorables because apres them, who the fuck cares what happens.
The cultural history of how that became thinkable and then plausible and then “oh look, it’s Boris Johnson lying his head off in Parliament again this morning, dear” right alongside “oh, it might rain today, take an umbrella”? That history is still obscure to many of us. We didn’t even notice we were walking into a dark tunnel down the same old train tracks, and then all of the sudden, wouldn’t you know it, there was a horn and a bright light right ahead.
Do we get to come out the other side? Right now I, like many of my fellows across the world, have no idea, because I am still busy running in a panic, trying to find the walls or the exit before the train runs me over.
Image credit: Photo by Jannes Van den wouwer on Unsplash