How to Respond to the Global Right Phenomenon

“Veterans of the entertainment industry like Steve Bannon and the reality television star Donald Trump instinctively understood how to cater to the resentment of those who felt left behind by neoliberalism but were unwilling or unaware of left-wing alternatives.”

Introduction

I came of age right at the end of the Bush administration’s seemingly endless tenure.  September 11th and the subsequent War on Terror were the first events that drew me to politics, and I did what I could to oppose the Iraq war and my own Canadian government’s culpability in altering the rule of law to allow for the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects. There was, then, a feeling that all of this was somehow a shift from the path laid out by Francis Fukuyama. Many were still optimistic that Fukuyama’s “end of history” had arrived—and that neoliberal capitalism was to be the only game in town.  Neoconservatives such as President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and—once upon a time—Ambassador John Bolton believed that outliers needed to be forcibly integrated into the system. The terrorist attacks of September 11th provided the perfect excuse to seek to export American-style neoliberal capitalism around the globe, where it was still resisted under the auspices of building an “empire lite” of client democracies. Third way politicians in the vein of President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Canada’s own Jean Chrétien were less overtly ambitious but still often toed the party line when needed. But it quickly became clear that—despite the stubborn insistence of the Americans and their geopolitical allies—exporting neoliberalism through military force was not only a near-impossible task; it seriously undermined the moral and soft-power clout enjoyed by the Anglo-European states in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Then, the Great Recession began in 2008, and the major cracks in the Fukuyamist line became even clearer. Not only did the capitalist economy crash and burn but the immense inequalities in wealth and socio-political power (which had been growing since the advent of neoliberal governance in the late 1970’s) were exposed in their most naked form. Millions suffered while governments imposed crippling austerity measures, withdrawing the liberal democratic state from those to whom it was nominally beholden. Meanwhile, the financial sector largely responsible for the crisis received welfare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars—much of it spent on bonuses for the billionaire class. Years later, we are still operating in the shadow of the worst economic crisis to hit and destabilize capitalism since the Great Depression.

It was in this context that what I call post-modern conservatism emerged. My co-authored book on the subject, What is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous  Times unpacks all of this in some detail. It examines how a dangerous form of reactionary politics emerged in the 2010’s as a response to the crises of neoliberal governance and deeper trends within post/modern culture. It also argues that the way for leftists to respond to the rise of the Right is through calling for greater democratization—and the redistribution of wealth. In the rest of this essay, I will discuss all these themes at some length. I will conclude by sketching out my own solutions to the problems of post-modernity, while talking also about Senator Bernie Sanders and the possibilities of concrete politics in our times.