“But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them. The revolts we are seeing are a mix of appalling visuals with absurd, pompous and incendiary rhetoric—but no coherent aims or rational ideology.”
Isn’t the idea of British sovereignty a long-established power structure idea? The very reverse of the authors hypothesis seems more likely to be true: those who are aiming to destroy power structures without having a cogent replacement are the cancel culture warriors blaming every ill on ever-broadening definitions of racism and white privilege.
Nadav Eyal, I'm struck by your depiction of Israel as a "province of the American empire." But do your colleagues in Israel really understand Trump as sui generis? I've been reading a variety of media throughout this termus horribilis, and much of it has linked US politics with right-wing nationalist populist movements and leaders around the world. Even if we only paid attention to Europe--the bombshell of Brexit?--and the US, it's impossible not to see the linkages between the demand and support for a leader like Trump and the illiberalisms consolidating elsewhere.
There is a book by Alexis de Toqueville describing what led up to the French Revolution. I think it is called The old regime and the french revolution (in english). I read it in January 2020, before the pandemic, and was struck by how much 1790 France resembled 2020 U.S.A. And right up to the storming of the Bastille, those elite writers and journalists and professors, and society elites and church elites (in ancient France) were calling for just what this destructive movement is calling for; namely, a tearing down of old structures and the old status quo, a redistribution of power and wealth into the hands of "the people". These people giving support to the movement had no idea--no idea whatsoever--that THEY themselves would be the first to lose their heads under the guillotine. And sadly, de Toqueville builds a convincing case that the various centralized governments which replaced the French nobility made life worse, much worse in every way, for the French, more so than anything they had experienced under the kings. I think it should be required reading at American universities, at least.
There's a theme that comes up a lot here, one sees it often in Mr. Mounk's writing and elsewhere, that there's a global rise of reactionary, illiberal, strong-man governments -- Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, etc. -- as if they all belong to a club.
My first reaction is to question how much to trust even the observations, before we get to the explanations. I know firsthand how farcical the descriptions of Israel are, so I have to wonder whether to believe the characterizations of the countries that I haven't personally observed.
My second reaction is why exactly North Korea, Iran, Venezuela et al aren't on the same list, or maybe a parallel list. Maybe they sometimes are, but certainly not always.
Third is whether the world is really trending this way. I wonder what Steven Pinker would say and what data he'd provide.
Finally, although I'm often impressed by the creativity, and sometimes even the intellectual rigor, of these meta-narratives of history, I'm not often sold on them. Effects are often overdetermined. Things that look alike from 30,000 feet look very different up close. I'm not saying we should give up on drawing conclusions from our observations, those conclusions should be tentative at best.
"Covid worsened disillusionment with the capacity of democratic governments to respond. Amplified by online lies, discontent with the liberal order is mutating into an assault on rational discourse itself. With Covid, it means anti-vaxxers and denialists fighting against science."
This sentiment is really troubling in an otherwise interesting piece. Using "science" as a shield for government overreach and the infringement of rights and "rational discourse" as a claim against public disagreement is a gross and ugly distortion to justify the elimination of liberty.
"But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
One can just as easily argue they were trying to preserve a power structure--their sovereign nation--in response to a bloated trade union that has for decades arrogated ever more power to itself, with no end in sight. When voters object it simply does end runs around them, as with the Lisbon Treaty.
"Those who broke into Congress ... were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
Reverence for the US Constitution is predominant among rightwing populists in the US, and I assume it was predominant among participants in the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, who were supporters of Donald Trump, a rightwing populist. Hence, I doubt that many of them had any desire to overthrow the framework of government established pursuant to the Constitution. And even if some of them would have liked to overthrow the established constitutional order they could hardly have expected to accomplish that without equipping themselves with weapons more formidable than pepper spray and curtain rods. They had gathered to hear a speech from Trump -- who expounded, in detail, his belief that the recent Presidential election had been stolen from him by widespread vote fraud and cheating by election officials in various "battleground" states; told them that the appropriate remedy was for the US Senate's presiding officer, Vice President Pence, to refuse to credit electoral votes from those states; and exhorted them to march to the US Capitol building to "make your voices heard" demanding that outcome. Arriving at the Capitol building in response to Trump's exhortation, they found that their access to the building's interior and their intended audience of politicians was blocked by the Capitol Police. Rather than meekly disperse or content themselves with making an incoherent hubbub outside the building, frustration, outrage, and animal spirits drove them to break in and attack the cops who stood in their way (many of whom, I daresay, were also Trump supporters).
Left-leaning journalists and politicians routinely refer to this lamentable incident as an "insurrection," which the more strident among them attribute to white supremacism. The description and the attribution of motive are both tendentious.
The right-wing hate of the Sixties ( the previous politician that Trump resembles most is probably George Wallace) exploded at the peak of the postwar economic boom, right when the white working class has never had it so good. (For that matter, the left wing hate came disproportionately--though not as exclusively as some claim--from the affluent.) If you want a more contemporary example, India is a country where hundreds of millions of people who used to live in extreme poverty have benefited from globalization, and they still elected Modi. So I'm suspicious of economic explanations for the antiliberal rage that Eyal talks about.
So what's my alternative? Maybe it's a status thing: the jocks can't stand the fact that the nerds have outcompeted them.
This is rather narrow-minded thinking:
“But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them. The revolts we are seeing are a mix of appalling visuals with absurd, pompous and incendiary rhetoric—but no coherent aims or rational ideology.”
Isn’t the idea of British sovereignty a long-established power structure idea? The very reverse of the authors hypothesis seems more likely to be true: those who are aiming to destroy power structures without having a cogent replacement are the cancel culture warriors blaming every ill on ever-broadening definitions of racism and white privilege.
Now do Antifa.
Nadav Eyal, I'm struck by your depiction of Israel as a "province of the American empire." But do your colleagues in Israel really understand Trump as sui generis? I've been reading a variety of media throughout this termus horribilis, and much of it has linked US politics with right-wing nationalist populist movements and leaders around the world. Even if we only paid attention to Europe--the bombshell of Brexit?--and the US, it's impossible not to see the linkages between the demand and support for a leader like Trump and the illiberalisms consolidating elsewhere.
There is a book by Alexis de Toqueville describing what led up to the French Revolution. I think it is called The old regime and the french revolution (in english). I read it in January 2020, before the pandemic, and was struck by how much 1790 France resembled 2020 U.S.A. And right up to the storming of the Bastille, those elite writers and journalists and professors, and society elites and church elites (in ancient France) were calling for just what this destructive movement is calling for; namely, a tearing down of old structures and the old status quo, a redistribution of power and wealth into the hands of "the people". These people giving support to the movement had no idea--no idea whatsoever--that THEY themselves would be the first to lose their heads under the guillotine. And sadly, de Toqueville builds a convincing case that the various centralized governments which replaced the French nobility made life worse, much worse in every way, for the French, more so than anything they had experienced under the kings. I think it should be required reading at American universities, at least.
We get it -- you don't like Netanyahu.
There's a theme that comes up a lot here, one sees it often in Mr. Mounk's writing and elsewhere, that there's a global rise of reactionary, illiberal, strong-man governments -- Orban, Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, etc. -- as if they all belong to a club.
My first reaction is to question how much to trust even the observations, before we get to the explanations. I know firsthand how farcical the descriptions of Israel are, so I have to wonder whether to believe the characterizations of the countries that I haven't personally observed.
My second reaction is why exactly North Korea, Iran, Venezuela et al aren't on the same list, or maybe a parallel list. Maybe they sometimes are, but certainly not always.
Third is whether the world is really trending this way. I wonder what Steven Pinker would say and what data he'd provide.
Finally, although I'm often impressed by the creativity, and sometimes even the intellectual rigor, of these meta-narratives of history, I'm not often sold on them. Effects are often overdetermined. Things that look alike from 30,000 feet look very different up close. I'm not saying we should give up on drawing conclusions from our observations, those conclusions should be tentative at best.
"Covid worsened disillusionment with the capacity of democratic governments to respond. Amplified by online lies, discontent with the liberal order is mutating into an assault on rational discourse itself. With Covid, it means anti-vaxxers and denialists fighting against science."
This sentiment is really troubling in an otherwise interesting piece. Using "science" as a shield for government overreach and the infringement of rights and "rational discourse" as a claim against public disagreement is a gross and ugly distortion to justify the elimination of liberty.
"But like many who voted for Brexit, they were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
One can just as easily argue they were trying to preserve a power structure--their sovereign nation--in response to a bloated trade union that has for decades arrogated ever more power to itself, with no end in sight. When voters object it simply does end runs around them, as with the Lisbon Treaty.
"Those who broke into Congress ... were aiming to destroy power structures without having anything to replace them."
Reverence for the US Constitution is predominant among rightwing populists in the US, and I assume it was predominant among participants in the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol, who were supporters of Donald Trump, a rightwing populist. Hence, I doubt that many of them had any desire to overthrow the framework of government established pursuant to the Constitution. And even if some of them would have liked to overthrow the established constitutional order they could hardly have expected to accomplish that without equipping themselves with weapons more formidable than pepper spray and curtain rods. They had gathered to hear a speech from Trump -- who expounded, in detail, his belief that the recent Presidential election had been stolen from him by widespread vote fraud and cheating by election officials in various "battleground" states; told them that the appropriate remedy was for the US Senate's presiding officer, Vice President Pence, to refuse to credit electoral votes from those states; and exhorted them to march to the US Capitol building to "make your voices heard" demanding that outcome. Arriving at the Capitol building in response to Trump's exhortation, they found that their access to the building's interior and their intended audience of politicians was blocked by the Capitol Police. Rather than meekly disperse or content themselves with making an incoherent hubbub outside the building, frustration, outrage, and animal spirits drove them to break in and attack the cops who stood in their way (many of whom, I daresay, were also Trump supporters).
Left-leaning journalists and politicians routinely refer to this lamentable incident as an "insurrection," which the more strident among them attribute to white supremacism. The description and the attribution of motive are both tendentious.
The right-wing hate of the Sixties ( the previous politician that Trump resembles most is probably George Wallace) exploded at the peak of the postwar economic boom, right when the white working class has never had it so good. (For that matter, the left wing hate came disproportionately--though not as exclusively as some claim--from the affluent.) If you want a more contemporary example, India is a country where hundreds of millions of people who used to live in extreme poverty have benefited from globalization, and they still elected Modi. So I'm suspicious of economic explanations for the antiliberal rage that Eyal talks about.
So what's my alternative? Maybe it's a status thing: the jocks can't stand the fact that the nerds have outcompeted them.