The Long View

The Days Grow Short

Actually, the days at this time of year are as long as days get. I meant the count of days, particularly in the sense of Revelation 12:12:

Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.

The passage has peculiar resonance when read in conjunction with Ross Douthat's recent piece, The Agony of the Liberals:

[The] current bout of anguish over the Obama presidency seems bizarrely disproportionate…

Obama who has done more to advance liberal priorities than any president since Lyndon Johnson….

At work in this liberal panic are two intellectual vices, and one legitimate fear. The first vice is the worship of presidential power: the belief that any problem, any crisis, can be swiftly solved by a strong government, and particularly a strong executive….

The second vice is an overweening faith in theory….

But it's here, with the looming fiscal crisis, that the more legitimate liberal fear comes in. Liberals had hoped that Obama's election marked the beginning of a long progressive era…

Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look….

In this environment, the rage against Obama for not doing more, now, faster, becomes at least somewhat understandable. It's not that he hasn't done a great deal for liberals during his 18 months in office. It's that liberalism itself may be running out of time.

Gee, do you think? The point to keep in mind, though, is that the same is true of the ideological particles that are entangled with liberalism.

Eye has not seen and ear has not heard what “conservatism” will mean in a few years.

Well, maybe a little.

* * *

As for the global system, Martin Hutchinson would have us believe that Wilhelm II had the right idea:

The international order has thus returned to the Kaiser's world of multiple states, high tariff barriers and unfair trade competition. Small countries will have no alternative but to seek protection in the spheres of influence of their larger neighbors. Participants in the protectionist new world order will be a diminished United States, a sclerotic and inward-looking EU, projecting its power no further than the Balkans, one or possibly two left-leaning Latin American blocs led by Brazil and Venezuela (which may or may not combine), a resource-rich and oppressive bloc led by Russia, a highly unstable Middle East dominated by Turkey and Iran, and an impoverished and unstable south Asian bloc led by India.

By far the most powerful and successful bloc will be led by China, which will include much of Southeast Asia and large parts of Africa. There will remain a few substantial independent states: an isolationist Japan, an unstable Indonesia, perhaps a modestly prosperous Australia. However, overall the world will geopolitically look like that of the aggressively competitive 1890s or, if we are unlucky, the haunted 1930s.

And ironically enough, the new Kaiser Wilhelm II will be Chinese.

This assessment reflects a common but grave misapprehension. The First Age of Globalization in the 19th century could lapse because it was no longer strictly necessary; national economies had the growing domestic demand necessary for sustained development. The major components of the international system were similar. This is not the case in the 21st century, in which the regions of the globe have differentiated like the regions of a middle-sized 19th century state.

China in particular makes no sense except as an exporter. It is uniquely vulnerable in the current context.

* * *

Purificationism will be the great menace to liberty and prosperity of the impending decades: thanks to Instapundit for the link to Daniel Pipes's link to the University of Buffalo's Ernest Sternberg article in Orbis, Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For. There we learn that 21st century radicalism is opposed to Empire in Hardt & Negri's sense of a universal hegemonic cultural system, an opposition amplified by a keen interest in deep ecology:

A hundred years ago, Marxism and Fascism evolved distinct identities out of the late nineteenth century's mire of anti-capitalist ideas…Purification is just now emerging from the post-communist ideological swamp….

About time, if you ask me. I suspect that this is the last time around, however. Purificationism may be a terminal-phase development, essentially a bookend to Francis Fukuyama's democratic liberalism.

We are in the midst of the worldwide rise of a non-religious chiliastic movement, which preaches global human renewal and predicts apocalypse as its alternative….Its enemy is the global monolith called Empire, which exerts systemic domination…over human lives, mainly from the United States. Empire does so by means of economic liberalism, militarism, multinational corporations, corporate media, and technologies of surveillance, in cahoots with, or under the thrall of, Empire's most sinister manifestation, namely Zionism…My task here is to describe what it is for…Put starkly, the world it envisions is pure. The earth will be protected, justice will reign, economies will be sustainable, and energy will be renewable. Diverse communities will celebrate other communities, with the only proviso that they accede to doctrine. Far purer than democracies of the past, this future regime will operate through grassroots participatory meetings in which all communities are empowered. As old nation-state boundaries fade away, communities will coordinate with each other globally by means of rectification cadres called non-governmental organizations (NGOs)… the agents of change will be networked bunds called ''social movements.'' Millions around the world already find this dogma so persuasive that it shapes their politics.

As the author notes, the sense that the Left is not just changing but decomposing is not uncommon among Leftists of good will; Levy's Left in Dark Times is offered as an example.

As for the movement's proponents, they think of their cause as the anti-globalization (or ''alter-globalization'' or ''no-borders'') movement, eco-socialism, grass-roots globalism, global resistance, global justice movement, global intifada, transnational activism, protest networks, movement of movements, peace and justice movement, and coalition of the oppressed.

Perhaps wisely, the author chooses not to remind us that the obvious term for a movement of purification is "Catharism".

We may note that Hardt & Negri are more postmodern than the account of the Purificationism given here, which in some ways is an alliance of victim groups. H & N emphasize that the ideology of the Empire is multiculturalism, and that culture of the Empire is enticing because it is so progressive.

The article is interesting not least because it argues Purificationism is not hypothetical, but already quite widespread and active:

In the popular media, anti-Americanism is almost always attributed to the United States' hubris, militarism, decadence, unilateralism, etc. Yet the ideological logic examined here suggests another cause: the rise of an impassioned post-communist world-transformative movement that has identified the United States as the world's villain.

But where will all this go, after the implosion, when the world system is less systematic?

They'll start reading Ayn Rand, I'll warrant.

* * *

As for the inevitable zombie apocalypse, this site has not wholly neglected it. Writing in Foreign Policy, however, Daniel Drezner has greatly deepened the theoretical treatment of the question with his article, Night of the Living Wonks: Toward an international relations theory of zombies.

The author assesses how the three principal schools of international-relations theory would react to the zombie menace. The gist of the piece is that zombies are the sort of thing Realists expect anyway, that Liberals would be less interested in eradicating the zombies than in the transnational structures created to eradicate the zombies, and that Neoconservatives would tend to lump the zombies with human enemies they want to eliminate, thereby diminishing support for military action against the zombies per se. The analysis is tentative but useful:

It is up to the reader to exercise his or her own judgment in determining what to do with this information. Indeed, interested and intelligent students of world politics should use their own brains -- before the zombies do.

Zombies at least have the merit that they are not vampires.

I hope I never see another vampire.