Canadian readers of my vintage will remember the Alberta-based bumper sticker campaign inspired by the demand made by an angry caller to a Calgary radio station to “let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark.” His ire was inspired by Trudeau pere’s National Energy Program and the threat that it posed to provincial jurisdiction over Alberta’s oil and gas resources. Trump’s 25 % tariffs on all Canadian goods imported into the US (10% on oil and gas) imposed on February 1st and then suspended for 30 days has aroused Canadian anger across the country. Ontario premiere Doug Ford went the furthest, arguing that we should cut off electricity and energy supplies. Trudeau fils was not willing to take that dangerous step, at least in the first round of response, but he did announce an escalating series of counter-tariffs. Whether Trudeau’s willingness to offer a robust response, or whether his economic advisors were able to explain the implications of “integrated supply chain,” or whether Trump decided he could attain his ultimate economic goals (shifting investment from Canada and Mexico to the US) by slowly bleeding concessions from Canada and Mexico I cannot say at this point. But what is clear is that the complex set of dependencies that ties the Canadian economy to the American puts Canada in an extremely precarious position.

Political forces that were once against free trade when it was first negotiated in 1987, and then deepened and extended to Mexico in 1993 with the North American Free Trade Agreement (renegotiated under the first Trump administration and re-christened the United States Mexico Canada Agreement) find themselves forced to defend it. Economic nationalists going back to Harold Innis have warned that the size differential between the Canadian and American economies meant that Canada will always need America more than America needs Canada. Abundant natural resources offer only limited leverage– if there is only one market for the resource (America), then threats to suspend exports are idle: the resource only has commercial value if it is sold, and if there is only an American buyer, then not selling will have even worse economic consequences than paying the tariff. In any case, critics of integration and free trade lost the argument, and now Canada faces its most serious economic problem since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The threat is real, in particular to the auto industry, situated in Southern Ontario. Windsor-Essex where I live could face economic obliteration. I am not exaggerating. Tens of thousands of workers in the assembly and engine plants and dozens of smaller tool and die, injection mold, and parts plants could lose their jobs. Parts go back and forth across the border multiple times. Do the math: if every time a part crosses into the US the manufacturer must pay a 25 % duty, the costs will be enormous. Experts predicted that the entire North American auto industry, dependent as it is on the integrated supply chain and just in time production, could grind to a halt in 7-10 days from the imposition of tariffs. While the fact that American auto workers would be laid off would be sure to get Trump’s attention, it would also get the attention of the owners of parts plants and future investors. Capitalists are risk averse: they will close plants on this side of the border and not make future investments if they are going to be exposed to tariffs. The industry will not disappear tomorrow (because plants cannot just be moved overnight), but overtime the plants will relocate to the US to avoid tariffs, or even the threat. That is Trump’s plan, and it may be starting to work already. Even though the tariffs have been suspended, a number of firms located in Canada have announced lay offs in anticipation that they will be applied in March. But even if they are not, Trump can keep them dangling like the sword of Damocles over Canadian heads.

Perhaps alone amongst nations, Canadian politicians take American political and economic aggression as a personal insult. They rhapsodize about what a good friend Canada has been to the US, what close allies we have been, how special and unique our connection is, how we share the world’s longest undefended border (but not any more, since Trudeau has agreed to further police and militarize it as part of the commitment he made to Trump to stave of the implementation of the tariffs). But they forget both Lord Palmerston and Pierre Eliot Trudeau, the first of whom argued that states have no permanent friends or enemies, but only interests, and the second who warned that when a mouse sleeps next to an elephant, it is always in danger of being crushed. One can disagree or even despise Trump’s tactics, but Trump is the President of the United States and has both the right and the power to impose whatever economic policies he and his advisors believe is in the interest of the United States.

Viewed from the standpoint of American capital, Trump’s politics are contradictory, which explains the mostly critical response from the business establishment. One must not forget that globalization was largely an American-capital driven process: the policy architecture that created the conditions for globalization was called the Washington Consensus. While the trade liberalization that made possible the re-location of manufacturing industries did not harm the bottom line of most industries– indeed, the whole point of relocation was to reduce labour costs and undermine the power of unions– it did gut many smaller American cities and create what is not affectionately known as the “Rust Belt. Some industries were also directly harmed by competition with lower priced Chinese imports– steel comes immediately to mind. All economic policy- and the neo-liberalism that underpinned globalization was a policy, not a distinct form of society– must be understood in terms of its function: to create the conditions for expanded capital accumulation. What we are clearly witnessing is the unravelling of neo-liberal globalization. States have been re-trenching behind stronger borders since 2008, and especially since COVID-19. Trump is part of a global wave of right-wing populist movements coming to power based upon dissatisfaction with the impotence of social democratic parties (in the US, the Democratic Party) in the face of global threats to working-class living standards. As is sadly too often the case, working class anger is directed downward- against immigrants, especially– rather than upward, against the ruling class. Nevertheless, the social and economic problems feeding right-wing populist movements are real.

Which brings us to the crucial, as always, question: what is to be done? And as soon as that question is posed one faces a problem– a paradox, really– that I have been wrestling with, without success, for many years: the short term damage caused by phase transitions between one form of global economic governance and another is real, suggesting that only fundamental, long-term, system transformation can solve the problems, but the short term pain that would be required to reach those long term goals would be at least as bad if not worse than trying to re-float the system, which impedes political mobilization in support of structural changes. Moreover, since structural alternatives are just textbook ideas, people understandably cling to whatever version of the system works for them– tariffs in the pre-free trade world, now free trade– because life requires certainty of need-satisfaction today and tomorrow. If the mortgage must be paid at the end of the month and groceries bought each week, workers are going to mobilize behind those forces that seem best able to secure the social conditions that allow them to do so. Most workers might not have much when compared to the ruling class, but they have a great deal more to lose than their chains.

But they do stay chained to a system whose periodic convulsions and internal transformation threaten their lives and livelihoods. How this paradox between the fact that these system convulsions threaten the very needs that keep people wed to the system is to be solved, I do not know. As is usually the case when an American threat to the Canadian economy begins to take hold, voices cry out that it is time to de-couple from the American economy. This time is no different. Left-nationalist voices have called for but a more self-reliant Canadian economy, voices further to the left have called not only for a more independent but also a democratic socialist economy These calls sound good in the abstract, and in the abstract their “necessity” can also be proven. But they float down from the (not absolutely, but relatively more secure) halls of academia. Making an argument in class to students is one thing, making it in the Penalty Box Lounge across Walker Road road from the Windsor Assembly Plant (Canada’s largest manufacturing plant) to auto workers facing immediate job losses would be quite something else entirely.

Sam Gindin grasps the paradox better than most. A long-time leader in the CAW/UNIFOR before leaving for a career as an academic, Gindin understands the lived realty of Canadian workers’ vulnerability to changing American priorities. He is also correct to infer– but it is more like a logical inference than a political program– that the radical alternative- not just de-linking but socialist reconstruction of the Canadian economy, is the only practical alternative. Correct as an inference but not as a political project because neither Gindin nor anyone else could tell the workers’ affected how this economy can be built, how long it would take, how it would function, and how it would employ the manufacturing workers who would certainly lose their jobs as their factories shrank because they were no longer selling into the gigantic American market. Moreover, the crucial question of how a relatively small economy could become an independent bastion of democratic socialism is left unanswered. Serious solidarity between Canadian and American workers seems impossible to imagine right now. The only existing vehicles by which such solidarity could be constructed are unions whose primary function today is job protection, and Canadian workers are facing the problems that they are facing because Trump is selling his agenda as a job-creator. Should it prove to be a job killer– as he has been warned it will- a return to the status quo ante rather than a new era of collective working class struggle is far, far more likely.

Trump is deploying nostalgia for a supposed Golden Age to build an ideological bloc in support of his virulent nationalism. Despair can be tempered by the knowledge that the mandate that he claims for his wrecking-ball approach to governance is much smaller than he claims– only 1/3 of eligible voters cast their ballot for him. But the power vested in the Executive branch is allowing him almost free hand right now. Democrats have, predictably, adopted a ‘make lawyers rich again’ court-based strategy to try to slow him down. But what is needed — Gindin and others are correct– is a renewed democratic socialist project: one that begins from shared interests underlying distinct identities rather than the individual and abstract ‘stories’ and ‘journeys’ of those identities. From shared and universal need-satisfaction as the material condition of the unique and to a society which allows for- as J.S. Mill said beautifully in On Liberty— an open-ended set of “experiments in living,” that is the principle upon which a renewed struggle for a better world must be organized. But it is just a principle, a platitude, really, which can do nothing on its own but requires the force of millions of people working together to put it into practice.

Who will discover the rhetorical and political key to inspiring people to take the risk they will have to take to solve the structural problems that capitalism as such poses with real invention rather than ideological nostalgia?

Albert’s book is a timely read. Only one week into Trump’s second term he seems determined to enact policies that will exacerbate every problem that Albert examines: climate change, fossil fuel extraction, pandemic readiness, economic competition, international political tensions, and the future of armed violence. Trump, delusional in his emperor’s new clothes, appears to think that viruses and atmospheric chemistry obey Executive Orders and that the historical forces that have slowly but steadily eroded American power since the triumphant days at the end of the Cold War can be arrested because one-third of American voters cast their ballot for him. Material and historical reality will not be cheated by Trump’s arrogance, but he can expedite the most destructive implications of those forces by his reactionary policy. Whether the world proves up to the task of confronting and stopping him before the end of his term remains to be seen. But that he will exacerbate the contradictions of the international system is almost certain.

Albert argues that the world is in the midst of an intensifying polycrisis. The term was coined by former European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker to explain the political, economic, and cultural problems faced by the EU. Albert applies it globally, to the multiple intersecting crisis of what he calls the “world-earth” system. The polycrisis is a “nexus of entwined crises characterized by feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and in many cases mutual amplification.” (2) The global system is confronted with a series of problems of reproduction on multiple levels and scales, from the availability of energy sources, to the climate, unstable hydrological cycles, a food system challenged by scarce land and high emissions, the threat of new information technologies, intensifying political-economic conflicts, and new means of violence in the hands of state and non-state actors. “The planetary polycrisis can be understood as a protracted phase of critical transition and turbulence that is unfolding simultaneously across multiple sub-systems of the world-earth system– from political economy and finance to climate, biodiversity, energy, food, disease, global security, and identity.”(19) Each of these systems interact in ways that can either exacerbate degenerative or catalyze regenerative trends.

Albert situates himself in the tradition of the Club of Rome’s celebrated and vilified Limits to Growth report of 1974 (updated, 2004) (64-5). Against the tide of criticism that the report initially received, Albert argues that the quantitative futures modelling that the report pioneered is an essential part of ecological, social, political, and economic problem solving. While he notes that models are generic maps that cannot provide clairvoyant foresight, we need them in order to understand where the world might be going, and where we might best try to steer it. Albert is neither a technotopian nor a catastrophist: he has a political agenda but he does not let that agenda skew his reading of the data. He is confident that, in principle, human beings have the political and scientific intelligence and practical and technological know-how to solve the polycrisis, but he notes that even the best case scenarios will take decades to implement and that even our best efforts might not be sufficient to avoid the worst case scenario.

Albert begins by noting that there is an unfortunate gap between qualitative social criticism on one side and quantitative scientific modelling on the other. He argues that social scientists, Marxists, and philosophers need to pay much greater attention to problems studied by “the earth system sciences, energy studies, ecological economics,, and other fields that highlight the geophysical parameters that will constrain possible futures of capitalism.” (9) Albert is correct to single out for criticism in this regard utopian socialists like Aaron Bastani whose “fully automated luxury communism” completely ignores the constraints of material reality. The capacity to extrapolate technological fixes from existing capacities is one thing, but actually scaling those technologies up or realizing their idealized potentials is quite another. One can imagine that we can mine asteroids and genetically engineer future human beings with superhero powers, but the technoptopian imagination cannot prove that their fantasy solutions will work or guarantee that they will not create even worse problems.

Albert’s critique of technotopian hand-waving is welcome, as his much needed critique of the creeping idealism of much of the Left and the ambivalent or even anti-scientific attitude that underlies the argument that science is just one narrative amongst many and that objective, material reality is a social construction all the way down. When material reality confronts those same leftists with objective threats to life– a pandemic or anthropogenic climate change– suddenly material reality becomes relevant again. Social constructivist critics of science are thus forced into ad hoc cherry picking of results: climate science and vaccines good, the bio-medical science of sex and evolutionary theory bad. But the same evolutionary theory that explains the reality and importance of biological sex in the development of the large brains that can invent social constructivism underlies the research that led to mRNA vaccines that helped fight COVID. It is true that natural science cannot solve social problems– only changed social practices can do that. But it can– and Albert shows how– help us understand that any social system is going to have to contend with physical forces that social theory cannot deconstruct.

Albert thus aims to synthesis the power of quantitative modelling with the Marxist critique of capitalism to defend an eco-socialist future as the best– most ecologically sound and socially just– future system. But he is clear-eyed about the impediments to that future. The primary impediment is the political organization of a global movement capable of supplanting right-wing populist and technocratic defenders of capitalism. But even if an eco-socialist movement is politically successful it will still face the intersecting and interacting material problems caused by the planetary system. If population continues to grow in that eco-socialist future, for example, then economies will have to grow too. If economies and populations continue to grow then energy demand will continue to rise, food demand will rise, and neighbouring socialist communities could still find themselves in conflict over lands, resources, or water. Successful solutions to these problems do not follow from the fact of worker and community control over the means of production. Albert rightly criticizes Marxists for typically underplaying the challenges posed by material scarcity and unintended consequences of different technical fixes.(78-9)

The great merit of the book is that Albert handles the empirical and disciplinary complexity of the argument and presents the different scenarios he maps with enough detail and dynamism that the reader begins to see the complex interactions between the variables without getting lost in the particulars and losing the all important sense of direction that his mappings are supposed to provide. He imagines different scenarios but ensures that the reader can always identify the through line of argument, what he calls the “planetary problematic. “The planetary problematic is the nexus of intersecting problems that impels and constrains the self-organization of the world-earth system, creating a possibility space composed of not-yet actual trajectories, attractors, and bifurcations within them.” (94) I did find his use of technical terms from the the language of the mathematics of chaos and complexity theory (attractor, dissipative structure, etc.) clashed with the narrative organization of the argument. Unless one is going to provide actual mathematical models there is no reason to apply terms like “attractor” to possible forms of social stability. An attractor is an emergent equilibrium towards which a chaotic state tends. History does not spontaneously tend towards an equilibrium state: social solutions must be argued over, fought for, and imposed.

That said, I was nevertheless impressed at the lucidity of his presentation of the complex ways in which attempts to solve one problem can exacerbate problems in another dimension. The issue of complex interactions cannot be solved by simply asserting that society is a totality and that a change in social relations will by its nature solve everything. Albert rejects the Hegelian-Marxist notion of totality because it is simplistic. Instead he turns to the idea of an “assemblage.” The term derives from the work of Gilles Deleuze, but Albert adopts the interpretation of Miguel Delanda. (89) He uses it to express the fact that elements of a system “are not logically coherent networks of ideas and beliefs … but rather looser configurations that nonetheless tend to produce distinctive patterns of thinking and feeling.”(106). Each facet of the polycrisis has its own structure and exerts its own forces, but that structure and those forces are also effected by changes to other independent but connected variables. Thus, “we confront a predicament that is more than the sum of its parts– a multiplicity of intersecting crises that should be studied as holistically as possible in order to illuminate its possible futures.” (61)

Navigating the polycrisis is therefore fraught with unintended consequences. The secular stagnation of the economy might be overcome by a new technological breakthrough, but that breakthrough might endanger lives and civil liberties if it emerges from an unregulated AI industry. The food crisis can be solved by increasing production, but increasing production can exacerbate the extinction crisis by converting more land to agricultural use, depriving species of their habitats. Economic growth might exacerbate the ecological crisis, but economic contraction can strengthen right-wing forces and intensify geo-political conflict. Massive investment in renewable energy might accelerate ‘Green” growth” and reduce carbon levels, but it might also generate competitive scrambles for rare earth materials. By mapping these interactions carefully, Albert hopes to improve the quality of political struggle and public policy, all the while noting, with appropriate modesty, that the complexity of material reality exceeds even the most detailed mapping exercize.

A notable strength of the book is that Albert connects his political-economic and ecological analysis to the all-important existential dimension of life. Crises are periods of change and transition, but periods of change and transition are also periods of intense anxiety. Some can resolve their anxieties by working to solve the problems, but others (a plurality, at the moment, in the United States and Europe, at least), try to recover meaning by embracing, often violently, a nostalgic interpretation of the past. Albert understands that life needs purposes as well as calories, and that the absence of purpose can cause people to lash out against the forces that they fear are threatening old certainties. It is not simply irrationality, stupidity, or xenophobia that motivates so many people to embrace simplistic right-wing populist slogans. Underneath those movements lies real insecurity and vulnerability. “The Existential problematic refers to the problem of creating forms of collective meaning, identity, and belonging.” It receives “less attention,” Albert notes, but “it is nevertheless essential to include it” because the navigation of the polycrisis requires political action and political motivations are shaped by the existential problematic.(105-6) I agree that this problematic is the most difficult to solve, but I would add that an effective solution must go deeper than merely countering right-wing populism with a politically effective left-wing populist movement. Ultimately, a solution to the existential problematic requires a value system that affirms finite earthly life as the ultimate value. Albert’s argument could have benefited from more systematic attention to the nature of life as the ultimate value. His argument presupposes that principle but he does not examine the different forms of life-value or provide a criterion (such as the ‘primary axiom of value’ developed in the work of John McMurtry) to distinguish life-coherent from life-destructive existential dispositions and value-systems.

Albert’s most detailed analyses are reserved for the exploration of how different ways of resolving one dimension of the polycrisis might affect other dimensions under different social regimes. He first examines how different strategies of system-management and change might operate in the socio-ecological and political-military subsystems, asking how different policy regimes– business as usual, Green Keynesianism, and different varieties of eco-socialist transition– will handle problems thrown up by climate change, resource scarcity, food supply, energy mix, and existential crises. Each solution has political and military implications: trying to hang on to old patterns of fossil fuel driven economic growth will intensify competition between states and increase the likelihood of military conflicts over increasingly scarce resources. However, Albert is careful to note that not every version of eco-socialism entails harmonious and non-violent global relationships. Some versions could see eco-socialist societies try to wall themselves off from others, while frustrated activists might adopt uncompromising, violent means of struggle (which would likely be met with severe police and military repression). While some of his political-military scenarios resemble a dystopic science fiction movie, none are completely adventitious but all are grounded in existing political tendencies and technological possibilities.

The book concludes with seven global outcomes of the polycrisis. He does not assign probabilties to the seven possibilities but sketches the trajectories that would lead to system-breakdown, neo-feudalism, volatile techno-leviathan, stable techno-leviathan, ecomodernist socialism, fortress degrowth, or abolitionist ecosocialism (226, 228-235).

I will not reconstruct these scenarios in any detail but simply note the distinguishing features of each. System-breakdown would occur if the world continues to try to save fossil fuel driven capitalism. In that case collapse– “irreversible breakdown in the structures, relations, and feedbacks that previously reproduced a particular socio-economic system, resulting in a new equillibrium that is less “complex” (147) might prove unavoidable. Collapse would not necessarily mean human extinction — society could could eventually be reconstructed, as feudalism reconstructed organized social life after the collapse of the Roman Empire– but it cannot be ruled out, either.

The other trajectories that Albert charts are attempts to stave off collapse through varying degrees of social regulation and change which rely on various degrees of consent or coercion. Albert calls the second worst case “neo-feudalism.” Neo-feudalism would be a response to a near-collapse scenario in which various forms of collective agents try to seal themselves off from the most destructive effects of the crisis. The nation state form might break down into smaller constituencies, some managed by private corporate powers, but all bent on maintaining elite lifestyles for the ruling class. (229)

The next two scenarios: stable and volatile ‘techno-leviathan’ are closer to existing patterns of nationalist retrenchement behind more ruthlessly enforced borders. Trump 2.0 prefigures in some respects what techno-leviathan might look like. In both scenarios, new surveillance and military technologies are used to police and repress restive populations. Intensifying food, climate, and economic crises combined with political resistance to structural change lead ruling classes to adopt a Hobbesian solution to social conflict. States increase their monopoly on the means of violence in order to better stamp out dissent. In the stable scenario nation states are able to manage internal and external conflict and maintain economic growth (whose fruits are appropriated by the wealthy); in the volatile variant internal and external conflicts predominate. Although surveillance and population control technologies would manage dissent and resistance, a significant segment of the population might consent to increased repression if it meant they were able to maintain their high-levels of consumption.(229-232)

The final set of scenarios would require significant degrees of structural and normative transformation. While these are generally more hopeful, none but the final– abolitionist eco-socialism– are without political dangers. Albert calls the first more hopeful trajectory ecomodernist socialism. In this variant fossil fuels are gradually phased out and renewable energy and the continued growth of digital technologies drives on-going economic growth. Albert speculates (not unreasonably, given the levels of investment in renewable energy) that China could lead this development. He labels the second hopeful the scenario ‘fortress degrowth.’ In this case some states complete the energy transition and create a steady-state economy, but try to reserve the benefits of those transformations for their own citizens. Right-wing or even eco-fascist variants cannot be excluded (although he notes that most eco-socialists would refuse to call fortress de-growth eco-socialist if it tends in a politically repressive direction) (233-34).

The final scenario is the most utopian: a complete democratic eco-socialist society in which the different structures of oppression and violent domination are overcome, a cooperative international order is achieved, ecological pressure on the earth’s life-support systems is relaxed, technology is utilized to better satisfy human needs and free life-time from alienated labour. Albert again displays admirable restraint by not predicting that such a future is certain or even likely. Even if it is possible to achieve, he cautions– rightly– that romantic versions of “revolution or bust” politics will not advance the cause. If it comes about, it will only be through decades of gradual struggle that focuses on achieving certain mediating plateaus (Guaranteed Basic Income, freedom from fossil fuels, etc) which make the climb to the next peak concretely possible.

In the abolitionist eco-socialist society “serving life and reducing suffering is an end in itself.” (241) Here the need to cash out this platitude makes itself felt: what does it mean to serve life as an end in itself? Does it mean to strive to create as many life-forms as possible given finite carrying capacity of the earth? What happens when the demands of human life conflict with the demands of other life forms, as they presumably will given finite space in every imaginable social scenario? As for human life, what are the limits to individual self-realization, given the reality of other people’s interests and needs? If Albert is correct (and I think that he is) and progressive political struggles must think systematically about the future, then it follows by the same reasoning that they cannot rest content with slogans about the intrinsic value of life, but must also explicate what that means concretely, given the material, social, and existential realities of life on earth under all social configurations.

–

Let me begin by saying that I hope for the sake of the residents of Gaza as well as the Israeli hostages and their families that this week’s ceasefire agreement not only brings a permanent end to the genocidal violence of the war but also creates the conditions in which Gazans can begin to rebuild their lives and Palestinians as a nation can achieve the state for which they have been struggling for eighty years.

That said, political analysis must be conducted with the head, not the heart. The head suggests that this ceasefire is most likely a temporary interruption of the war rather than the start of a permanent peace. No one knows what Trump’s envoy said in the reportedly tense meeting with Netanyahu, but I think it most unlikely that he threatened to cut off the supply of weapons. Did he offer a quid pro quo: agree to the ceasefire and America will continue to provide political cover for settlement expansion? No sooner had the agreement been signed and endorsed by the Israeli cabinet than Washington was promising to unlock delayed deliveries and ensure comprehensive re-supply. Incoming Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Israel retains the right to kill every member of Hamas. Keep in mind that Hamas is not only a guerilla army but a social movement. Perhaps even worse, incoming Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee does not regard the illegal settlements in the West bank as illegal or settlements. And worse still: the day before the ceasefire was to go into effect, Netanyahu warned that this first phase was only a temporary pause to the fighting and that both Biden and Trump assured him that Israel had the right to restart the war if they chose.

The odds of such a pretext being found or created are much higher than this ceasefire holding and paving the way for the reconstruction of Gaza.

In the short term, Trump manages to get credit for the ceasefire (shades of the release of American hostages in Iran immediately upon the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1980). What exactly he will eventually get credit for remains to be seen. Everyone is right to celebrate the ceasefire, but that is only the most basic precondition of Gazans being able to rebuild their lives, and it does nothing to advance the broader struggle for Palestinian self-determination.

Hamas will try to spin the agreement as a victory, but what have they won? The release of prisoners? The Palestinian struggle for self-determination is not a struggle for the release of political prisoners. Moreover, most of those who will be released in the first phase were arrested after October 7th. In other words, had Oct 7th not happened, those prisoners would not have been in prison. Those who have been convicted of more serious crimes will be released to third countries. Should they try to sneak back into Gaza you can be certain that Israel would treat that subterfuge as a violation of the agreement and relaunch the war.

But the bigger question is: setting aside all humanist concern for the massive loss of life, did October 7th advance the Palestinian cause? The answer is no. Hamas has been pulverized as an organized fighting force. Its leadership and best trained cadres have been killed. Anthony Blinken noted that they have probably recruited as many members as they have lost, but recruitment is one thing, being a militarily effective force is another. Where will these new recruits be trained, and who will supply them with weapons? Since the imprimatur of Trump is now on this ceasefire– and whatever else Trump is he is a narcissistic ego-maniac– direct American involvement could not be ruled out if Hamas were to start openly training these new recruits. Hamas was banking on a general uprising in the West Bank as well as support from Hezbollah and Iran. There was an upsurge of struggle in the West Bank, but no general uprising, and the biggest impact of October 7th there was to dramatically intensify Israeli military activity. Hezbollah did support the struggle in Gaza until its leadership was killed and its fighting positions decimated in relentless airstrikes that forced it into a ceasefire. Iran engaged Israel on two occasions, but has been sufficiently cowed by the tactical defeat of Hezbollah to back off for the moment. The loss of Syria as a transit route for Iranian weapons into Lebanon is a serious setback for Tehran. In any case, they will likely have their hands full dealing with a renewal of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign. As for the Houthis who continue to waste the scarce resources of one of the world’s poorest countries on “resistance,” their resistance is futile, militarily ineffective, and politically counter-productive.

Hamas can claim that Israel did not achieve its maximalist objectives in launching the war, but that is a distraction from the main issue. Did Hamas achieve its objectives of initiating a final phase of the struggle for self-determination that would lead to the defeat of Israel? Clearly, October 7th was a massive political failure. It may come to be known as the worst strategic decision in the history of national liberation struggles. It humiliated and embarrassed Israel, but successful national liberation struggles are are not about embarrassing the enemy but achieving national liberation. Moreover, that humiliation only served to amp up the ferocity of Israel’s response. One did not have to be an expert in Middle Eastern affairs to predict that Israel would completely flatten Gaza after losing more than 1000 soldiers’ and citizens’ lives. I am not an expert, and I did predict just that the day after the attacks.

Who is in the stronger position today, Hamas or Israel? Israel has suffered in the court of global public opinion, Spain and Ireland have recognized Palestinian statehood, and Netanyahu and Gallant have warrants for their arrest. The International Court of Justice continues to deliberate on the question of whether Israel committed genocide during its war. If completely destroying the life conditions of 2.3 million people is not genocide, what is? But France and Italy have said they will not arrest Netanyahu if he visits and Israel is unlikely to suffer any practically meaningful consequences even if the court concludes that genocide was committed so long as it enjoys American support. The idea that such support will be lost under Trump is almost unthinkable.

The most frightening thing about the situation is that there are people in the Israeli government to the right of and more extreme than Netanyahu. It would be nice if the majority of people learned from catastrophes like October 7th or 9/11 and asked themselves: what did our side do to help create the conditions in which an opposed group thought that a homicidal rampage was necessary? But that is almost never what happens. Wounded and humiliated people demand vengeance and give power and license to people ruthless enough to exact it. More circumspect, self-critical, and rational voices are sidelined and cowed into silence. Israeli’s demonstrated in the hundreds of thousands for the return of the hostages but it will be a long time before any Israeli government will make any concessions on the road to a Palestinian state.

At present, the political future of Gazans and Israelis is in the hands of two gangs of fundamentalists and an erratic, easily distracted American President. I see little hope for a revival of creative and constructive thinking during Trump’s term of office. How can the Israeli peace movement find the words to sway a majority of Israeli’s that the horrors will never stop until Palestinian self-determination is achieved? How can Palestinians create a new generation of leaders who can find the words to sway those in a position to force concessions- Israeli citizens and American governments– to take concrete steps towards the creation of a Palestinian state? Equally importantly, how can they keep the world’s attention focused on the festering structural problem once the ceasefire takes effect and the mind of global civil society wanders?

The 51st state, eh? From my study I can see the lights of the Ambassador Bridge at night; if I walk to the bottom of my driveway, I can see across the river to Detroit. America is so close, and so far.

Decisions, decisions.

Would we still be able to buy Beavertails, or would Bearclaws become the dominant fried dough confection? Could we still call Corndogs Pogos? Could we negotiate a carve out for ketchup chips? Would we be forced to drink Vernors, or would Canada Dry ginger ale still be sold? Could we still make rye, or would bourbon become the national whiskey?

And spelling: would we have to drop the ‘u’ in neighbour and adopt other Noah Webster barbarisms like ‘thru’ for ‘through?’ If I say, “I was really pissed last night,” will my new co-citizens understand that I was drunk, or will they think that I was angry with someone? Would Windsorites in time develop the nasally Midwestern drawl of Michiganders? The metric system would be gone, but it never really took hold of the popular imagination anyway.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have to wait in traffic at the border if there were no border.

Hmm…. no more wait times at the border.

I am not a nationalist or a dogmatic anti-American. I am not going to boycott Tigers’ or Red Wings’ games or give up my membership at the Detroit Institute of Arts because 1/3 of eligible American voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump. Still, joining up? It would be ideal if there were no borders or boundaries dividing up the globe and everyone could just wander freely where they will. But people do not live in ideals. There are borders, and, like a comforter on a cold winter night, they create a warm space in which one can feel at home. There is no place like home, wherever home is, and I just happened to have been thrown into being here, in Canada.

I have no illusions about the place- every problem that bedevils America can be found here. Our reputation for peace and equality rests more on foreigners’ ignorance of our history than our realities. Still, there is no place like home: one develops a feel for a place and appreciates ease of motion through the culture in which one grows up. So I feel attached to Canada by temperment and habit. The pace of life is just a little slower, our public policy perhaps just a little more cautious. Public health care is a good idea, even if the practice is more and more wanting. There is no abortion law, and most Canadians do not think that their country was put on earth as a beacon towards which all other ships of state must steer– or be sunk. Canadians are not as nice as our reputation makes out, but there is some civic humility at odds with the Manifest Destiny triumphalism of our neighbours– or should I say neighbors.

Most Canadians agree. A poll taken in the wake of Trump’s bluster about annexing Canada found only 13% in support becoming the 51st state, So, while millions of Canadians are happy to winter in Florida and Arizona and thousands more will no doubt continue to seek their fame and fortune in Hollywood (if it does not does not burn to the ground), most of us are attached to our independence. So thanks, Donald, for the offer, but maybe we’ll just keep muddling along, attached but separate.

As with much of what he says, Trump’s chatter about annexing Canada is part provocation and part feint. Trump is a carnival barker and an illusionist. His bluster is sleight of hand to distract people from the real agenda. Remember the border wall? It did not get built, but the number of migrants crossing the Southern border rapidly declined, because his rhetoric dissuaded them from coming in the first place. Annexing Canada is drawn from the same playbook. The USMC free trade agreement is due to be renegotiated and Trump is simply positioning the US to extract more concessions from Canada and Mexico.

If I were a poker player I would love to play someone like Trump. He pushes his chips in every hand. Occasionally a player like that will not be bluffing, but the math says that his hand will be weaker than he thinks more times than not. However, in order to beat him you have to have the courage to push your chips in too and call his bluff. Remarkably, few players do.

Trump’s threats had Justin Trudeau scurrying down to Mar a Lago to grovel at Trump’s knee. No sooner did he get off the plane from Florida than a billion dollar border security package was unveiled. Denmark similarly has promised to make billion dollar military investments in Greenland to appease Trump. The situation there is made even more complicated by the fact that Greenland wants its independence from Denmark. Self-determination is their right, but they ought to think very carefully about whether the time is right to exercize it. Denmark is a member of NATO and the EU. Those memberships would help Greenland resist any unilateral American moves to legally incorporate it as some sort of dependency like Guam or Puerto Rico. But alone, a nation of 55 000 people would be totally at the mercy of American power. Trump does not respond to moral suasion, only counter-power, and such a small nation would have none.

A better example than the Canadians and Danes of how to respond to Trump has been set by the Mexican President Claudia Steinbaum. Instead of genuflecting, she repaid Trump in his own currency, mocking his proposals and reminding Trump how much of America was once Mexico. Trump is not only a carnival barker, he is a bully. Bullies are not tough but only seem so because they pick on weaker victims. As soon as a victim stands up for themselves the bully moves on to an easier mark. When all the victims stand together there are no more targets and the bully either stops trying to intimidate people or ends his days isolated and lonely.

Trump is motivated by nostalgia– make American great again implies that there was a time when America was great, but no longer. He forgets that the time for which he is nostalgic, the early twentieth century when American manufacturing and science led the world, was reconfigured by American economic power because the old model no longer worked for American corporations. High wages and working class power helped create the stagflation crisis of the early 1970s. Exporting manufacturing industries undercut working class power, mass migration, legal and illegal, increased the supply of cheap labour for service industries, generating downward pressure on wages, while making the American dollar the global reserve currency ensured American control over the terms of trade, vastly increasing the power of Wall Street in the global economy and ensuring American political economic hegemony.

Trump’s nostalgia may be rooted in a correct assessment of the relative weakening of American hegemony. China, India, Russia, Brazil and the other members of the growing BRICS bloc are not going to take dictation from Donald Trump. While it is too early to say what a new configuration of global political economic power is going to look like, there is little doubt that such a re-organization is underway. No one nation, person, or movement is powerful enough to resist the tectonic forces of the global political economic system. Trump’s braggadocio masks the fact that America is less able to steer the global system in its own interests than at the end of the Cold War, when America stood alone, economically and ideologically, as the global hegemon. Who today seriously looks to the United States for moral leadership?

But global trade still flows through Wall Street. The American dollar will not be dethroned anytime soon, and America retains enough destructive military power to destroy the earth a few times over. Trump is going to find out very quickly that America has less power than it did when he left office the first time, not because of Biden’s mistakes, but because the nations of the rest of the world have begun defining their interests against America’s. They have seen sanctions and asset seizures and technology embargoes deployed against America’s enemies, but they have not sidled up, begging to become friends. They have learned that America cannot be trusted, and they have re-worked trade routes and invested heavily in technological development to free themselves even further from the American yoke.

Trump is not as stupid as he sometimes sounds. He knows that American power has declined. His threats and posturing are transparent efforts to put competitors off balance. His approach is not always ineffective in the short term, but over the long haul his tactics will force other nations together in blocs like BRICS and accelerate the very decline that Trump is trying to arrest.

The dawn of the new year always generates ambivalent emotions. People resolve to overcome all the bad habits that gave some pleasure to their lives, media outlets compile their best of everything lists, while professional doomsayers sing their yearly Jeremiads, warning that the next year will be the year when everything that has been falling apart for the past year, and the year before that, and the year before that, finally collapses. The climate, the return of Trump, runaway malevolent AI, another pandemic, nuclear conflict with Russia … we are all going to die!

But maybe we will struggle through another year, despite Trump and natural gas stoves. And if we are still breathing come January 2nd, we will have to soldier on, facing the mundane problems we have always faced about how to run major social institutions, how to communicate with each other, how to evaluate where we are as societies, how to identify and solve problems. For most of human history these tasks were reserved for social elites, typically men with some sort of aristocratic pedigree which they took to be a sign of superior talent and capacity which entitled them to decide on behalf of everyone else how society would be governed. These elites were capable of works of epochal intelligence (as in ancient Greece, whose language gives us the English world aristocracy– rule of the best). But the free time required to walk, reflect, and compose the words that still resound today was– as Aristotle admitted– purchased at the cost of the freedom of women and slaves who did the work so that the “great souled” people could spread their genius.

We easily forget that the canonical Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were critics of Athenian democracy and defenders of slavery. Plato’s Republic is an extended reflection on how the principle of democratic equality corrupts the polis. In a democracy, he argues in Book Nine, the slave is as valuable as the master, the son as valuable as the father, and everyone’s position on matters that concern them is considered in the deliberative assembly even if they lack the expertise that wise decisions require. Therefore, he concludes, democratic equality is a contradictory equality between unequals, doomed to collapse. Democracy, he concludes, is a violation of the social conditions of intellectual excellence, a dangerous consorting with the lowest of human desires, and a fatal step towards disorder that can only end in tyranny.

There are shades of this aristocratic critique of democracy in the left-liberal reaction to the re-election of Trump. While they do not always say so out loud, there is an undertone of disdain for working class Trump voters: maybe they just aren’t smart enough to understand their own interests. After all, the core of Trump’s base are men without university degrees. If people were better educated, then perhaps they would stop entrusting their interests to autocrats like Trump and Putin. Had they read The Republic they would know that tyrants are elected because they promise to protect the interests of the poor.

In contemporary politics as in Newtonian mechanics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The left-liberal critique of the masses produces an abstract democratic-populist defense of the masses. It is difficult to assign any precise ideological identity to those who disagree with Trump but would defend the right of working class people to vote for him, but one common thread that links what I might call left-conservative populists with right-conservative populists is a gnawing angst about the state of popular culture and the educational institutions that produce the people who shape it. (i am not sure this term is correct, but it is at least not oxymoronic. Andrew Collier has written an excellent essay on the philosophical overlap between Marx and classical conservatism). Rather like Plato and his aristocratic friends, left and right populists worry that there is a destructive slackening of standards and values and that the educational system, and in particular, universities, share a great deal of the blame.

One could understand such a criticism coming from classical conservatives, for whom the democratization of higher education after World War Two was synonymous with slackening of standards. “Undergraduates without Latin and Greek!! Preposterous! What’s next, eating fruit with one’s hands at High Table!?!” But how can populists, who, after all, claim to be on the side of the people, worry that the consequences of the democratization of higher education are in effect destroying it? The question is not easy to answer. I want to look at two recent examples of what I am calling, for lack of a better word at the moment a left-conservative populist critique of higher education to tease out what is true in their arguments from what is a false romanticization of a past that never existed.

Joanna Williams (“The Death Throes of the University are Upon Us”) and Joel Kotkin, (“The American University is Rotting From Within”), both writing in spiked-online, warn that the cultural politics of the twenty-first century campus are destroying the intellectual integrity of the institution. They are not wrong to warn that universitiess in the United States, the United Kingdom (and Canada) are in a period of serious crisis. Kotkin notes that undergraduate enrollment in the United States has declined from 18.1 million in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021. The decline is even steeper in the arts and humanities. In England, Williams adds, amidst the general decline in enrollment symbolically important programs like Philosophy at the University of Kent and English at the University of Canterbury have closed. In Canada and especially Ontario, universities, in particular smaller and comprehensive schools, are facing dramatic budget crises as a result of decades of government underfunding and a sharp decline in international student enrollments as a result of recent changes to federal immigration policies. My home institution, the University of Windsor, is facing a deficit of perhaps as much as 30 million dollars, which is about ten percent of its annual revenues. The Vice President of Finance has warned that the deficit could require “catastrophic” cuts.

(At present the administration has not presented a comprehensive plan to address the crisis. When they do, I will return to the political economic dimensions of the crisis of universities. Here I want to focus on the pedagogical and political thrust of Kotkin’s and Williams’ critique).

That thrust is nicely summed up by the subheading of Kotkin’s essay: “The modern academy is a threat to reason, liberty, and Western civilization.” What follows is mixture of anecdote and statistics that purports to prove that there has been a fundamental transformation in the nature of academic reason. Whereas universities were once focused on the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth that mission has been overtaken by a Cultural Revolution-like indoctrination campaign led by tender-hearted, weak-kneed, and soft-minded left liberals. Williams paints an analogous picture of the English university.

The targets will be familiar to those who follow the institutional politics of the contemporary English language university. There are purportedly absurd infiltrations of a “social justice” agenda into science, such as the engineering assignment that Williams discusses that asked students at King’s College to create ‘a product for LGBTQ+ people focused on providing education or safe spaces.” There are complaints about the decline of literacy, the capacity of students to read complete texts, lamentations about the proliferation of trigger warnings on classic literary and philosophical texts, politically correct changes to departmental nomenclature, and a climate of general hostility to the achievements of Western civilization adapted from anti-imperialist critiques of colonialism and racism. Kotkin sums up the problems:

“Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.”

There is much truth is Williams’ and Kotkin’s arguments. Trigger warnings are childish and anti-intellectual; there have been dozens if not hundreds of cases of academics fired for violating institutionally imposed ideological lines; scientific method is often caricatured and misunderstood as an ideological construct of ‘the West,’ “inclusion” is often promoted at the expense of intellectually essential confrontation, contestation, and rational debate, and the research and teaching mission of universities too often clouded by platitudinous and practically useless commitments to extraneous political goals like “decolonization.” Williams is correct: academics who value their vocation as teachers and researchers must oppose these tendencies to the extent that they interfere with the teaching and research mission of the university.

However, both Williams and Kotkin are both guilty of romanticizing the history of the university and confusing demographic uniformity of the student body and professoriate with “reason, liberty, and Western Civilization.” The historical fact of the matter is that the nineteenth century model of the university which still forms the basic structure of the contemporary university was populated exclusively by white middle and upper class men who had time to devote to their studies because they did not have to work to pay tuition. The university system expanded rapidly in the nineteen sixties to absorb the Baby Boom generation, allowing working class students to access higher education for the first time, but also women, Blacks, and other minority groups. The transformation of curricula still ongoing today and often denounced as intellectually weak and anti-Western, the introduction of various forms of critical theory that questioned the philosophical, literary, and artistic canon and exposed links between political, economic, and cultural power and science, objectivity, and truth, was largely the result of struggle against a suffocating normality which young people in revolt against their parents’ world refused to accept without question any longer.

One generation’s revolution is the next generation’s normality and the new generation’s object of struggle. The ‘critique of Western civilization” that Kotkin decries is largely a function of the fact that Western societies and student bodies have become even more multicultural at the same time as voices from the Global South and Indigenous peoples refuse to be spoken for any longer and rightly insist on speaking in their own voices against the worst of Western civilization: imperialism, colonialism, racism. While the nations of the Global South have achieved political independence, the forces that oppressed them politically continue to operate on the socio-economic level. All one needs to do is to examine the flows of wealth from Global South to North and consider the degree of material inequality to understand that the history of imperialism and colonialism continues to damage the lives of people in the Global South. If the worst of Western civilization is that legacy of racism, its best aspect is its capacity for self-criticism that underlies both scientific method and philosophical questioning. Indeed, systematic criticism of “Western civilization” was the hallmark of The Enlightenment: read Condorcet, or L’Abee Raynal, or Diderot if you want to find impassioned denunciations of what passed for civilization at the time. Far from a dispassionate and neutral exercise of reason in pursuit of objective truth, the best scientists and philosophers at the time consciously deployed science and reason against established structures of rule and assumptions about what is true, valuable, and just. Today’s critics of Western civilization carry on that legacy (even if they often misunderstand ‘Enlightenment reason’ as part of the problem).

Kotkin and Williams might agree, but would perhaps rejoin that social criticism is not the problem but the illiberal and anti-intellectual effort to mold the university exclusively in their own ideological image. These efforts extend to efforts to get institutions themselves to take positions on key political struggles like the Israel-Gaza war. These are both real problems: the university, as the name implies, is an institution devoted to the free production, dissemination, and critique of knowledge. Academic freedom is an institutional right whose purpose is to ensure that these defining missions can be pursued. It cannot be qualified by any institutionally-imposed political postures. Moreover, the mission also cannot be qualified by groups outside of the university, whether corporate donors or politically mobilized groups trying to impose their agenda on teaching and research. The academic mission of universities is negated to the precise extent that the principle of freedom of inquiry, teaching, and mutual criticism is subordinated to money or particular political-cultural agendas.

At the same time, just because it is a space for free inquiry, teaching, and argument, the university campus is a politicized space. The wave of encampments that swept North American and UK campuses this summer were fully in keeping with the best traditions of the critical exercise of reason. What side do you think Voltaire or Diderot would have been on were they alive to witness the systematic destruction of cities that were home to 2.3 million people? Are babies being left to freeze, women and children forced to beg for food, and men stripped to their underwear and paraded around being treated with the dignity that Kant argued was the due of every human being? The fact that some protesters made some stupid comments in support of Hamas does not negate the right to protest the Israeli response. What is Israel’s reflex attack on any critic as anti-Semitic but an attempt to short-circuit debate of its history and policies?

As for the much maligned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda, one must not forget that its original incarnation as “Affirmative Action” was necessary to open the academy to women and Blacks. It too was attacked as a dangerous weakening of standards, when in fact it was an expansion of perspectives beyond the white middle and upper class men who completely dominated all academic fields prior to the 1960’s. The broadening of voices engaged in teaching and research inevitably broadened the range of subjects and methodologies taught and utilized, but that broadening was– and should still be understood as– rooted in the university’s mission to encompass the evolving whole– the universe– of human intellectual work. The universe of human knowledge encompasses both empirical methods that must be judged on the basis of their results and critical methods which expose the historical and social forces that always act shape knowledge production. That social and political forces shape knowledge production does not mean that knowledge and truth are nothing but social constructions. The atomic weight of nitrogen is the same in Beijing as it is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But who gets access to scientific education, who gets positions at the most prestigious universities, which research programs are regarded as credible and which regarded as pseudo-science, have all been affected by non-scientific forces and assumptions. The belief that there was a a time when science was a pure pursuit of objective truth now compromised by ideological agendas is simply untrue. Consider only the history of military funding of scientific research at the best American universities. Is the US military not motivated by ideological concerns? Truth is not reducible to a social construction, but the institutions that pursue the truth are always structured by social forces that are motivated by social, political, economic, and ideological motives that determine what is regarded as legitimate and illegitimate scientific work. When critical methodologies help us understand those forces they actually make scientific work more scientific. Ideological influences compromise scientific objectivity, but if they remain undiagnosed their distorting influence cannot be corrected.

That is not to say that the DEI agenda cannot become a threat to academic freedom. David Robinson, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers argued in a recent edition of the CAUT Bulletin that there is a difference between academics committing themselves to curriculum development and institutions mandating commitment to administrative DEI programs as a condition of hiring and promotion. (David Robinson, “EDI Statements: A Threat to Academic Freedom?” CAUT Bulletin, Vol. 70, No. 6, September-October, 2023, p.7) When DEI becomes an imposed public confession of faith it is indeed a threat to the mission of the university as an institution of free, open inquiry and argument. And it is not only administrations that are to blame here. Kotkin and Williams are right to focus attention on students and (mostly younger) academics for mobilizing against perspectives and people with whom they disagree. There have been too many instances of talks being cancelled, colleagues being publicly shamed, mobbed, and fired, for articulating positions that run afoul of left-liberal orthodoxy. George Elliot Clarke, Professor of English at the University of Toronto and past poet laureate of the City of Toronto sums up the problem: “It is cowardice and hypocrisy to pretend that the only threat to ourselves arises from Neanderthal administrators or authoritarian (foreign) governments or states, We also need to reject forthrightly censorship calls from both leftist and rightist, self-righteous “activists” as well as from their often nicely tenured allies who will okay bullying tactics so long as the Putsches are conducted against persons whose ideas they dispute.” (George Elliot Clarke, “Letter to the Editor, CAUT Bulletin, Vol. 70, No. 6, September-October 2023, p. 18). Such efforts are a direct threat to the university as a space for open inquiry and argument. Those who insist on the need for ideological conformity are free to resign their academic position and start a revolutionary party. Otherwise, tolerance and the unforced force of the better argument (Habermas) must prevail on campus.

But that principle cuts both ways. Curriculum reform, questioning and opening the canon, exposing the ideological and social forces that shape the disciplines, exposing the role of economic and political power in the determination of what counts as legitimate knowledge production, and allowing free play and learning to listen to formerly silenced voices is actually the best of what the university is. What have the best artists, philosophers, and scientists done over history other than break free of imposed orthodoxies that had become barriers to the growth of knowledge and the creation of beauty? That is what Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo did with regard to Aristotelian physics, that is what Einstein did with regard to Newtonian mechanics, and it is what critical race theorists and feminists and Marxists and anti-colonial scholars are doing today when they deploy their analyses to promote the growth of knowledge rather than obfuscate material reality.

Is the human intellect constricted or expanded when it listens to the voices of the colonized speak about their experiences? Is out literary sensibility constricted or expanded when we read literature in English written by authors from outside England? There is too much of the middle-aged scold in arguments like Kotkin’s and Williams.’ One fears that they would have been on the side of the salon directors who refused to show Impressionist works, or amongst the stampede of outraged concert goers fleeing Stravinski’s Sacre de Printemps, or nodding in agreement with Einstein’s rejection of quantum mechanics. But God does play dice with the universe, paintings do not have to be constructed on the basis of Renaissance theories of perspective, poems do not have to rhyme, and philosophy can criticize traditional standards of objectivity and truth. Science does not thereby cease to be science, painting and poetry art, or philosophy critical engagement with knowledge claims in the service of the goal of understanding our world in all of its aspects as broadly and deeply as we are capable of understanding it.

In a rare act of political intelligence, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria rather than prolonging a probably futile fight to save his regime and life. Does this portend a better result for the Syrian people than the Libyan or Iraqi? The victorious rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has also shown some political intelligence, saying all the right things, that the victory of the rebel forces is a victory for all Syrians and promising to respect the rights of minority communities. Thus far the transfer of power has been as disciplined as possible given that it comes at the end of a 13 year civil war. The government stepped down, the rebel forces have been ordered to respect state institutions, to refrain from looting and destroying public property, and to withdraw from heavily populated urban areas.

Most analysts that I have read were surprised by the rapidity of the regime collapse, but with two weeks of hindsight perhaps it was not so surprising as it initially appeared. The leading rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was supported by Turkiye while Assad’s main backers, Russia and Iran, could not or were not willing to expend the resources necessary to blunt the rebel advance. Iran has over-extended itself in its conflict with Israel and Russia remains in a brutal slog against Ukrainian forces almost three years after its invasion. The Syrian army, now mostly poorly paid conscripts, clearly refused to fight. If only that had been the case thirteen years ago. Political wisdom, it seems, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

It also remains stoically silent. The fall of one autocrat teaches other autocrats nothing. Gadhaffi watched Saddam fall, but fought to the end. Assad watched Hussein and Gadhaffi fall and ultimately fled, but not before killing hundreds of thousands in the civil war and forcing millions of others to flee as refugees. One wishes that they if they were going to go, they would go before destroying the lives and life-conditions of their people for generations.

But now Assad is gone. Al-Sharaa is playing the role of the wise statesperson well. Is he sincere? Is he merely trying to build credibility with the foreign powers– and there are many (Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkiye, and the United States)– who hold the future stability of Syria in their hands? Is he buying time before eliminating rival factions? We will find out in the coming weeks and months. But the bigger problem than his intentions is whether he will be able to control the internal and external situation. What the Syrian people seem to be clamouring for more than anything at the moment is peace: time to breath and think about their future free from fear and intimidation by one side or another. The political signs, whatever al-Sharaa’s intentions, do not encourage hope that Syrians will get what they most need right now.

The streets of Damascus were full of cheering Syrians, understandably overjoyed by the collapse of the regime. Horror stories spilled out of the political prisons in which former dissidents and rebels were held and tortured. Hands flashed peace signs and faces remembered how to smile. But across the country Israel was destroying stocks of strategic weapons, air defences, and advancing into the buffer zone created by the treaty that ended the Yom Kippur war. Russia was securing its naval and air bases, while the United States was bombing what it said were Daesh positions in the east. In the North, Turkish sponsored forces were attacking Kurdish militias even as refugees streamed back into Syria.

It is impossible for those of us who live in politically stable countries to imagine what it is like to live in a environment in which at any time a foreign military can start bombing or shelling or launch an incursion. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham did nothing to resist the destruction of the Syrian military’s strategic weaponry nor did it act against American encampments in the south. It spokesperson wisely demurred when asked what its position on the Israeli incursion was. Perhaps they have learned the lesson that Hamas (and Hezbollah and Iran) have been learning painfully over the past year. It is politically insane to wage a primarily military struggle against vastly superior military forces. If their goal really is stability and reconstruction then they will have to arrive at and maintain a modus vivendi with all the major powers in the region, regardless of their ideological commitments.

Arriving at an agreement with Turkiye should be easiest, since they are Hayat Tahrir al-Shamm’s main sponsor. Nevertheless. if they really do want to represent all Syrians, they will have to end the fighting between the Turks and Kurds, and it is not clear how they could do that, if the Kurds choose to keep fighting (and why would they stop, so long as they are attacked and their national aspirations unfulfilled?) How will Russia react to the threat to its bases in Syria? These are vital to projecting Russian power into Africa and maintaining the laughable facade that Putin has constructed as an anti-imperialist. Does Russia have enough money to pay the rebels off to secure the future of their installations? It is unlikely that Russia would enter into an armed conflict against forces with a high degree of popular legitimacy at the moment, but if they have no money or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham won’t be bought off, how far will Putin go to protect these assets?

Even more worrisome for the new regime is Iran. All the analysts that I have read agree that Iran is the major loser in the fall of Assad. Al-Sharaa stated explcitly that the new regime will not tolerate Iranian interference in Syrian affairs. But without that cooperation,Iran will have extreme diff iculty re-arming Hezbollah. How far are they willing and able to go to undermine the new regime? They are not going to invade, but they are skilled in covert operations and must still have allies in the Alawite power structure and military. Can they accept defeat and walk away, even if it means abandoning Hezbollah? That would be the politically wise move: Iranians elected a reformer and are demanding concrete steps to improve their living conditions. But inertia and path dependency often trump intelligence in international relations.

Iran’s next moves will also be influenced by its knowledge that if it and Hezbollah are the main losers then Israel (and the US) are the strategic winners. Israel is sending a very clear message to the new regime: we retain overwhelming military superiority and can destroy whatever is left in the country. The United States has celebrated the fall of Assad. But Hayat Tahrir al-Shama has its origins in al-Qaeda and remains a designated terrorist group. There are still US forces on the ground. How will the US and Israel behave long term towards a terrorist group if they should end up forming the next government of Syria? On the other side, how will an Islamist government (terrorist or not) relate to Israel and the United States? If they ignore Palestinians, how can they claim that their victory is a victory for the whole Islamic nation? If they intervene, even with only ideological support, how will they avoid the wrath of Israel and the United States? Thus far they have chosen silence in favour of stabilizing their own country. But missionary fervor is probably drowning out clear reason in the heads of some members of the Islamist movements. Will al-Sharaa be able to keep the most radical forces in his own movement under control?

Hamas seems hopeful that the fact that the victorious movement is Sunni will lead them to eventually offer some sort of support. If so, they have become even more delusional over the course of the war than they were when they launched the self-destructive attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. I argued at the time that Iran and Hezbollah were not going to help them achieve the strategic victory they hoped they would. Iran and Hezbollah have been decisively weakened. A young government with its eyes focussed on domestic problems will not be keep to intervene in a doomed military struggle. But even if they did, without air defences (the fatal weakness of the so-called ‘axis of resistance’) they would accomplish nothing accept the further destruction of the country that they are promising to rebuild.

The final question concerns whether they will be able to re-build the country and create the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions for national unity. Western commentators have largely celebrated Assad’s fall but judged Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Islamism a permanent obstacle towards achieving the goals of national reconciliation and progress. Some suspect that al-Sharaa’s conversion from terrorist to national liberation fighter to peaceful politician is a ruse. Perhaps. But Islamism and fundamentalist terrorism are not identical and there are other examples of Islamist movements consciously rejecting violence after advocating and practicing it. The best example is the conversion of Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Islamiyah, whose leadership ultimately rejected violent struggle without renouncing its fundamentalist interpretation of the primacy of Islamic law and the need for theocratic rule. What they rejected was the terrorist principle that religious rule could be imposed by force. If the people are not ready for religious rule then trying to impose it would be both unjust and impossible. (See Sherman A. Jackson, “Islam and Peace: A Muslim Fundamentalist Perspective,” Peace Movements in Islam, Juan Cole, ed). Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham undergo a similar conversion? Perhaps, but there is an important difference. Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Ilamiyah were the losers in a long struggle with the Egyptian state. Their conversion to non-violence occurred in prison. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has just won the civil war. Victorious movements which see themselves as doing God’s (or History’s) work are rarely capable of the sorts of compromises that politics on earth requires. Those who would build (or prepare) the City of God on earth (whether Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim) are not looking in the right direction. They look up in order to build down below, whereas they need to look into the eyes of their fellow citizens and see them first as fellow human beings. That look of recognition is possible from different religious perspectives, but I cannot see how it is possible from any fundamentalist religious perspective. If Islam (or Jesus, or Yahweh) is the truth then those who belong to different faith communities or atheists who reject the truth of them all cannot but appear to be inferior. They might be tolerated, but how can they be regarded as equal?

Syrian socialists and feminists have joined in the celebrations unleashed by Assad’s fall, but are far more circumspect about the near term future of the country under its new fundamentalist leadership. Swiss-Syrian socialist Joseph Daher cautions that:”it is still an open question as to whether HTS will follow through on these statements. The  organization has been an authoritarian and reactionary organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and still has foreign fighters within its ranks. Many popular demonstrations in the past few years have occurred in Idlib against its rule and violations of political freedoms and human rights, including assassinations and torture of opponents. It is not enough to tolerate religious or ethnic minorities or allow them to pray. The key issue is recognizing their rights as equal citizens participating in deciding the future of the country. More generally, statements by the head of HTS, al-Jolani, such as “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” are definitely not reassuring, but quite the opposite.” That concern is amplified amongst revolutionary Syrian women. Writing in the Guardian Mona Eltahawy quotes Razan Zaitouneh, disappeared by the Assad regime in 2013, who warned against naive or opportunistic hopes that there was any important political differences between Assad’s technocratic and the Islamist’s religious terror:”We did not do a revolution and lose thousands of souls so that such monsters can come and repeat the same unjust history,” she wrote to her friend and fellow human rights activist Nadim Houry, in an email dated May 2013. “These people need to be held to account just like the regime.” What good would it do to replace one oppressor with a different one?”It would do no good at all.

Unfortunately, the victory of the rebel forces emphasizes once again the extreme weakness of the Left in the Arab world. In the West, the Left in power is synonymous with over-caution and practical betrayal of working class interests. In the Arab world, it is synonymous with authoritarian personal rule and top-down dirigiste state control of the economy. The promises made in the early days of Nasserism in Egypt and Baathism in Syria and Iraq failed to deliver shared wealth, universal education, and secular-socialist national solidarity. As in Iran in 1979, a movement which thinks that the solution to all life’s problems is found in a single book written 1500 years ago has the revolutionary initiative, weakening further the link between the practice of revolution and the value of social progress beyond “ancient, venerable prejudices” (Marx, Communist Manifesto). How can they lead a complex, pluralist society with a long history of secular (albeit violent and authoritarian rule) into the future?

The virtue of secular as opposed to religious rule is that the later can allow individuals to fully and freely develop their religious sentiments and rituals while leaving state institutions as public frameworks of interaction that do not rest on any sectarian basis. A theocracy, by contrast, cannot allow the full and free development of non-religious forms of life. The separation of Churches and state does not eliminate churches but allows for religious freedom in the private and non-political public sphere (civil society). But a fundamentalist religious regime can tolerate social and religious differences but cannot recognize their equal value. If a regime is fundamentalist then it will insist on the incorporation of its values into social fundamentals, especially law and education. Again, this problem is not unique to Islamic fundamentalism, but it is posed with extreme urgency today in Syria, where a generation’s hopes for revolutionary liberation are now threatened not by failure to overthrow the regime but success.

The calendar says late fall; the unrelenting grey, the bite in the West wind say early winter.

The days will grow shorter still for two more weeks.

The ways of the world:

Hymns are sung to the season of peace and goodwill amongst men.

Another genocide report has been released.

Values float free of reality.

People stock their liquor cabinets before the crush on Christmas Eve.

Hollow eyed children stare into the rubble; children’s eyes agleam in the forest of Christmas life.

Existential injustice.

Everyone is dead: one cannot help but feel sad; everyone is alive: one cannot help but feel happy.

There is no contradiction.

The 80s are back!

Drone bombing. All out ballistic missile attack. Revenge strike.

The overnight snow limns the boughs of the cedar tree: a Bailey’s and coffee.

What immortal hand or eye can frame that fearful symmetry?

There is nothing better than shortbread, except shortbread and a whiskey.

Power grid collapse. Oil depot fire. Apartment block implosion.

It all happened, just like that.

Taking the pass on the fly; cutting hard to the net.

They were dancing when the shooting started; the bass drowned out the grenade explosions.

The pink roses, still in bloom.

Middle aged conscripts hunker, trapped in a fire pocket.

Meat grinder assault.

Eat, drink, and play, the downtown holiday way!

Civilians flee rebel advance. Will the country disintegrate?

Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews; Anarchists, Conservatives, Liberals, Marxists:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world.

No one knows how to change it.

The calendar says late fall; the unrelenting grey and the bite in the West wind say early winter.

The days will grow shorter still for two more weeks.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2024 Booker Prize winning novel Kairos explores the interpersonal drama between a young woman, Katharina, who falls in love with a sophisticated older married man, Hans. The novel teeters on the precipice of the banality of its theme, but Erpenbeck’s sparse, unadorned prose and unique interlacing of the personal and the political prevents it form falling over the edge. Erpenbeck lets the story unfold itself and refrains from interjecting moralizing commentary from on high. In other words, she wrote a novel, not an emotional instruction book that tells the reader how they should feel. The author mercifully refrains from nudging the reader to be “outraged’ about power imbalances. There is no hand-wringing about the “inappropriateness”of the relationship. What is appropriate and inappropriate is left for the characters to decide. Erpenbeck understands– and too many today do not– that the artist’s job is to show, not tell.

The relationship begins with a chance encounter on a bus. Spontaneity and chance are the origin of desire. Kairos: the time for critical decisions, in ancient Greek. Does she approach him? Does he respond? The aleatory begin of their affair reminded me of Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters, as did Erpenbeck’s emotionally restrained prose, but whereas Mosley concentrates on the forces carrying people from place to place, into and out of each other’s lives, Erpenbeck focuses on the fraught entwining of inner life with inner life and both with the world in which they find themselves. Katharina, young and naive, wants Hans’ life to absorb her own; Hans, older, urbane, a veteran of many affairs, wants her close and not close, wants her to be his although he refuses to be hers. The emotional breaking point is reached when Katharina, working at a theater in Frankfurt-am-Oder, succumbs to a young co-worker’s advances and sleeps with him. Hans– despite having earlier broken off the affair (humiliating Katharina at the train station in Frankfurt)– is consumed by the jealously only a late-middle aged man can feel at the thought of his young lover in bed with a younger, stronger, more vigorous man. He rekindles the romance. To spite her? because he does really love her? both? But he still will not leave his wife and son. She indulges his mildly naughty demands: she dresses in her schoolgirl-like Pioneer uniform and allows Hans to spank her with his belt. Does she desire to be punished? Does he desire to punish her because she slept with the young man? Or is he punishing himself through punishing her for his guilt at his father’s Nazi past? Or his own complicity with the regime that allows him perks and privileges?

The answer is “yes” to everything in all the ambivalence and contradiction between past and present, love, desire, and obligation, of the human, all too human wanting ‘a’ and not wanting ‘a,’ of wanting ‘a’ and ‘not-a,’ and not wanting ‘a’ and ‘not-a.’ Erpenbeck’s confidence as a writer lies in her not simplifying things. She leaves the reader to wrestle with the ambiguities and obscurities of intersecting lives in a moment of impending social collapse.

The first time they have sex, soon after first meeting on the bus, Hans plays Mozart’s Requiem. Kairos: the decision has been made. The Mozart metaphor is obvious: they are doomed, their society is doomed. Obvious though it maybe, it establishes an effective frame around the narrative. Their passion is as intense as Mozart’s dark tones and as hidden as the body in the grave. Once their society collapses and Katharina and her friends flock across the now smashed wall to shoplift clothes they realize that the “Wessies” freedom might not be the profound political-philosophical ideal it was sold as being. Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin, also treats the political side of the narrative with a light touch. She avoids both overt nostalgia for the East and triumphalist celebration of the West. What she does do brilliantly is let people’s complex emotions shine through. Without any obvious effort on Erpenbeck’s part the reader is dizzied by the kaleidoscopic options suddenly opened up to the citizens of the East– but we are also chilled at the cold brutality with which the intelligentsia of the East (of which Hans is a leading member) are dismissed as if they had never had a thought, penned a word, or conducted an experiment worth sharing. Brecht’s early death perhaps serves again as a rather obvious metaphor for a society that died before it had a chance to fully develop. Katharina attends a few meetings of young reformers who wanted to use the opening created by glasnost and perestroika to democratize their system. But these young democratic socialists are run over in the stampede of the majority to the shopping malls that would anesthetize them while their factories and research institutes were closed, their real estate bought up at pennies on the dollar (or pfennings on the mark), and their society dismantled. There was no dies irae, just a quick bang as the wall was smashed down and then a whimper as West absorbed East like an amoeba extending its pseudopod around a food morsel.

But before the East collapses the novel gives those of us who grew up on the other side of the Wall during the Cold war a glimpse into the inner and daily lives of citizens of the East. When I was younger I was fascinated by the question of how people lived behind the Iron Curtain. I took great pleasure in finding out what seems obvious now but was not when all we had to judge the daily lives of people was capitalist propaganda that portrayed life beyond the Berlin Wall as grey, drab, humourless, and emotionless. “Sure the Russians are good at hockey, but did you hear they operated on Tretiak’s legs so that he was more flexible?” But it turns out that people on the other side of the wall were just like those of us on the West: they fell in love and had sex with people they weren’t supposed to fall in love and have sex with, they did the same terrible job negotiating the contradictions and ambivalence of love and desire; they drank wine and listened to Mozart. Katharina had a pet guinea pig when she was a girl (which, even three decades after the wall came down, genuinely surprised me– I never imagined that kids would have had pets– propaganda works!). She used to roller skate in the summer and she finds paint for her new apartment; Hans goes to the Baltic for sea vacations with his family every summer.

Seeing that a visitor was shocked at the simplicity of his home, Heraclitus said “come in, for the gods dwell even here.” Erbenbeck shows us that human beings lived even there, behind the Iron Curtain. She even humanizes Hans’ complicity with the regime. It turns out that his privileges were a result of his agreeing to spy on members of the artistic community. Finding that fact out after his death, Katharina suddenly sees the interrogations that Hans subjected her to when she returned to Berlin from Frankfurt in a new light. But it is not the light we might expect. She does not see Hans’ truth as the Stasi operative beneath the jilted lover. Rather, she sees the human being beneath both desiring the impossible– to know, fully and completely, another human being. Reminiscing as she looks through his file, she tries to remember what they were doing on the day that he decided to quit spying. “May 13, 1988, is when she wrote him her reply to the third cassette: I want you to know me through and through, skin and hair and everything beyond. If only “I’d known that I was your mirror image. But he can neither see her nor hear her, and he can’t replay either.” (294).

Tuesday afternoon and into the early evening I was expecting a Harris win. Then, when CNN declared a victory in Iowa for Trump, I started to think that the polls showing Harris ahead or tied with Trump in most battleground states could be wrong, as, indeed, they were. As dawn broke, the scale of Trump’s victory was becoming evident … and the predictable bloviating from anti-Trump quarters had begun to make the rounds on social media.

Whether the second Trump presidency will prove to be the fascist take-down of “American democracy” his critics are warning about remains to be seen. I am not inclined towards catastrophising in politics: capitalist political institutions are system-preserving. Liberal democratic institutions have served American capitalism very well. They enjoy broad support- as we will see, Trump was not elected because his supporters want to destroy “democracy.” Most, I will argue, want it to work for them and not just wealthy urban professionals and bankers. They have, as they did in 2016, made a very bad choice, but one should remember that they did choose, by the rules of the democratic game as it is played in America. The “power” the people exercise in actually existing democracy is meagre: the economic power by which the ruling class shapes public life and policy is regulated by the state but never fundamentally compromised no matter who assumes office. That does not mean that it does not matter who gets elected; party policy can make a difference in peoples’ lives. But it remains true that the machine rolls on no matter who is at the helm. My suspicion is that just as in his first term Trump will produce more smoke than heat. More importantly, the damage that he threatens to do to targeted groups can be resisted– if people organise, rather than mourn.

Two broad explanations have been offered for Trump’s victory. Each expresses one side of a more complex truth and say at least as much about the politics of those who authored the explanation as the dynamics of the election itself. The first is the most predictable and the least supported by the available polling evidence: the Trump victory is a victory for racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. For example, Moustafa Bayoumi writing in The Guardian argued that “The very idea of another Trump presidency is devastating. His entire campaign consisted of unbridled race-baiting, woman-hating and fascist-in-waiting messaging, yet still he prevails. This is what succeeds in this country? The answer, it’s now clear, is a resounding yes.” If true, then it must be the case that everyone who voted for him is racist, misogynist, and xenophobic. Some Trump voters undoubtedly are racist, misogynist, and xenophobic, but the scale of his victory and his performance with a wide variety of voter groups suggests that overall, his voters were not motivated primarily by hatred.

Trump’s improved standing amongst women, Latino’s and (to a much lesser extent) Black men, and Harris’ corresponding underperformance suggests strongly that what fueled Trump’s victory was a repudiation of the Democratic party’s campaign as much as it was an intrinsically pro-Trump vote. While inflation has slowed, it dogged the last years of the Biden administration and its consequences for living standards pushed voters towards Trump. The the actual results as expressed in a series of exit polls reported by CNN paints a picture that is not easily explained by the argument that Trump rode a racist wave of poor and religious whites to victory: 46% of Latinos voted for Trump, 65% of Native Americans voted for him and, in the crucial Michigan battleground, only a quarter of Arab-Americans voted for Harris. Those groups were not motivated by racism. While it is true that about 8 in 10 Blacks voted for Harris, that was down from 9 in 10 that voted for Biden. But 3 in 10 young Black men under 45 chose Trump- a small but noticeable statistical increase over the general pattern. The results prove that people do not simply mechanically vote their identity but think about the available options. Many Latino’s voted for Trump despite the bad joke about Puerto Rico at the convention because they too are concerned about immigration levels and many are opposed to anything that smacks of “socialism,” given their experiences in Cuba and Venezuela. One might disagree– strongly– with their choice, but to simply dismiss Trump voters as racists and misogynists risks displaying the “contempt for the masses”‘ that Ernesto Laclau argued underwrites elite criticisms of populism (On Populist Reason).

The competing explanation, better evidenced than the first, argues that the reasons that Trump won were primarily economic. Thus Bernie Sanders argued that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Sanders echoes concerns that have been expressed in a number of quarters, none more carefully argued than Thomas Piketty’s critique in Capital and Ideology, that social democratic parties in Europe and the Democratic party in the United States (which functions symbolically as a centre-left party even though it is not) have indeed abandoned the working class: in terms of policy, in terms of culture and ideology, and in terms of their mass base. Social democrats and the Democrats are becoming the party of urban professionals and highly educated youth. This group is not a class, as critics of the “professional managerial” class argue, but are better understood as class fraction– the educated and cultured upper tier of the petite bourgeoisie. While many (professors, for example) have material interests in government spending, they are united less by objective economic concerns and more by a general cultural outlook- the “diversity and inclusion agenda” pilloried by critics of ‘woke” politics and the target of Trump’s and the right’s generally satirical rhetorical attacks. Whereas “inclusion” used to be thought of in material terms: furnishing historically oppressed groups and exploited classes with the resources that they required to satisfy the full range of their needs and freely develop their life-capacities– the basic political economic goal of socialism, broadly construed– today it has become– or, what amounts to the same thing, successfully portrayed as becoming– an out of control ideology adrift from both material rationality and the culture of large sections of the population. The economic explanation of Trump’s victory argues that people flocked to Trump because they are tired of having their material interests ignored, that they believe in fairness but reject the interpretation of fairness that involves downplaying the interest of one section of the working class (whites) against other sections of the working class (minority groups), and they believe Trump when he says that he will work for all Americans. Polls and interviews support this interpretation, but also abstract from some important splits noticeable in the working class vote.

The most important split is between unionized and non-unionized workers. Exit polls showed that 55 % of unionized workers voted for Harris and only 43% for Trump. Now, 43 % is not nothing, but what we should pay attention to is the per centage gap: 9 per cent is a huge difference in politics, and it suggests that unions remain spaces for political argument. That is, where leaders can engage members and members can engage each other, a majority of workers can be brought round to seeing what might seem obvious but, politically, is not: a billionaire blow hard property developed is not going to work in the interests of the working class. What this fact further suggests is that Sanders and other left critics of the existing Democratic agenda might indeed have a point: if Democrats concentrate on those economic concerns that link and unite the experience of different members of the working class they will be able to undercut the apparently unifying but actually divisive arguments of Trump. (The same argument holds in Europe, where the far right has gained at the expense of social democratic parties who, like the Democrats, have been abandoned by working class voters).

But I think that not only do the policies need to change, so too does the rhetoric. What I called in my book The Troubles With Democracy “the politics of commas” (a political claim is asserted and is then followed by an endless list of every particular group and sub group to ensure that no one’s “story” is left unacknowledged) needs to give way to a politics of concrete universality. The term is technical but the meaning is simple: humanity is a self-determining species; unlike rocks, we are capable of shaping our social and individual reality. Those self-determining capacities are expressed in distinct ways: different languages, different philosophies, different cultural traditions, different cuisines, different modes of making art, different family patterns. Patterns are good or bad not according to their content (secular versus atheist, English versus Spanish, heterosexual versus gay marriage, etc), but according to whether their organization and practice depends upon the domination and oppression of other groups. So long as some citizens’ worship of the god they believe in does not impede others from living as atheists, so long as one person loving the person they love does not impede another from loving the person they love, then both are good. Everything good in human life is a living expression of our human capacities to make sense of our place in the universe and forge mutualistic bonds across differences. The principle that the best society ensures the satisfaction of everyone’s natural and social needs so that they can live the lives they find meaningful and valuable, so that everyone can make contributions to the common (social, cultural, and economic) wealth– has to become again the organizing centre of left politics. That was the principle that early animated the socialist movement and it has to become the animating centre again.

However, it is also important to register concern with the degree to which a culture of conservatism has taken hold amongst those sections of the working class that voted for Trump. The problem with this culture is not necessarily its content– there is nothing inherently wrong with the nuclear family, or heterosexuality, or being white. Clinging to any or all as the bedrock of civilization and attacking other forms of social relationship and ways of life is the problem: every bit as much the problem as the identity politics and the woke agenda that conservatives attack. The political problem with both form of identity politics is that every group silos itself in defensive reaction to the mere existence of other groups, no one can talk to one another, and arch-opportunists like Trump– who, if you ask me, believes in nothing except his own power– are able to exploit the divisions.

In one of the more perceptive analyses of the election that I have read, Ben Davis drew an analogous conclusion. He argued that “while the new right has made great hay of returning to a communitarian model of politics, economically populist, socially conservative, and focused on family and society, the truth is that the Trumpist movement is the opposite. It is hostile to the very concept of society and community. To combat this, we need an unabashedly pro-society left. The way to win back power for a solidaristic and humanist politics is to rebuild working-class democratic institutions. In 2020, Sanders asked the question: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” This is the question we must ask over and over again and the work we must do is making sure the answer becomes yes.” A pro-society left, I would argue, goes deeper than just working class institutions to the foundations of social life in need-satisfaction. The problem with identity politics is that it starts from difference and has no way other than (often cloying) pleas for solidarity based on the unique vulnerabilities of the group doing the pleading. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s attack on the “wretched and pinched style” of his socialist contemporaries (The Will to Power, 77). Today’s style– platitudinous, preachy, and above all self-righteous– annoys, but the bigger problem is that moralistic pleading does not work (and when poorly articulated because too easy a target for sarcastic critiques from the right).

Solidarity must be built up from common interests and those interests are grounded in shared natural and social needs. Properly nourished, everyone’s body can dance in its own way. Coherent valorization of differences must start from their roots in shared human needs and capacities for self-making and self-expression. Only once differences are understood as the expression of underlying, universal human needs and capacities can people learn that they enrich themselves by appreciating other people’s dances, even if they would not dance that way themselves. Once a common basis of understanding has been established, hard cases of conflict can be resolved through good will, honest but sharp debate, and compromise.

On Tuesday, November 5th, 2024, between 45 and 50 per cent of eligible Americans who choose to vote will cast their ballot for Donald Trump. The 2024 election will be the third time running that up to half of American voters decide that a man who has a civil conviction for sexual assault on his record, is facing a panoply of criminal charges stemming from his first term, has made open threats to use the power of the Office of President to revenge himself on his enemies, who has vowed to use the military to forcibly expel immigrants who entered the country illegally, and gives free play to his boorish and bullying personality (but now expressed more erratically than in his first two campaigns) is the better choice to lead their nation. His cross class alliance of the ultra-wealthy, the least educated segment of the white working class, evangelical Christians, and rural voters retains its political integrity despite objective differences of material interest (tax cuts for the rich, for example, deprive working class communities of the resources they need to invest in the public services they require). The solidity of this coalition induces exasperation amongst Trump’s opponents: recall Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quip and Biden’s exasperated reference to Trump voters as “garbage.“

There are, no doubt, some deplorable figures surrounding Trump and much that comes out of his mouth is garbage. And yet, his attraction, to those for whom he is politically attractive, has not been diminished by the tireless efforts of journalists to expose his lies, lawyers to expose his crimes, and his opponents to warn that at best a second Trump term would result in the most partisan authoritarian Presidency in American history and at worst, the fascist destruction of American democratic institutions.

They have reason to worry. I have already noted his threats to his opponents, but these might be dismissed as bluster. More troublesome is the historical similarity between the cross class alliance he has constructed and the social basis of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s. European fascism was spawned by deep socio-economic crises and was designed to save capitalism by destroying working class opposition. However, it succeeded by advancing an organicist view of the state which deflected attention away from the political economic causes of the crisis. The ruling class mobilized workers for a fascist solution by constructing demonized “internal enemies” (paradigmatically, in Germany, Jews and Communists). The projection of the causes of crisis onto ethnically and politically stigmatized scapegoats proved effective in bringing working class supporters on board for a project that soon liquidated their traditional economic and political defence mechanisms: social democratic and communist parties and trade unions. Having destroyed the organized opposition, the fascist parties were free to remake the nations they now ruled- Spain, Italy, Germany– into totalitarian states ruled by overt violence.

While the class basis of Trump’s electoral alliance bears some similarities to the social foundations of fascism, and his rhetoric is certainly authoritarian and fascistic (most notably, his constant references to illegal immigrants as a racialized enemy within), and some of his supporters manifest the fanaticism of the SA– armed gangs that the Nazis employed in their early days to intimidate their enemies– there are important differences. While his most extreme supporters are fanatical, they lack a coherent institutional structure. More importantly, Trump does not command an ultradisciplined paramilitary force akin to the SS. Whereas European fascist parties could count on the complicity of the armed forces, all the available evidence suggests that the senior commanders of the US Armed forces and its officer corps are deeply opposed to Trump and would almost certainly refuse to obey orders to deploy against fellow citizens. There is also no evidence that rank and file soldiers are itching to mutiny and become an armed phalanx of the MAGA movement. Moreover, the American ruling class, like American society generally, is deeply split, unlike the ruling classes in Europe in the 20s and 30s, which were more solidly behind a fascist solution. As Micheal Roberto reminds us, it would be wrong to conflate fascism as an extreme solution to the structural crisis of capitalism with the form that it took in the 1920s and 30s, but I think it would also be wrong to ignore the dissimilarities and much deeper wells of opposition that Trump would face were he to actually try to abolish the formal rule of law, criminalize political opponents, and destroy the institutions of the democratic state (weak as they might already be). (see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth)

But what interests me here is less precise social and political analysis of the class base of Trump’s movement and more the reasons why it is so impervious to the astounding pile of evidence that can be marshaled against his record and program. Least effective of all has been the attempt- which those who make the charge think of as their ace in the hole– of branding him a fascist. True, there is a sizeable internal Republican opposition to Trump, but the tens of millions of people who are going to vote for him are not in the least dissuaded because of media and academic criticism of Trump’s authoritarian, and perhaps fascist tendencies.

That none of his committed supporters are moved to rethink their support by credible arguments that he is a fascist is cause for serious concern. But does it mean that MAGA is an incipient fascist movement just waiting, like the Nazi’s, for a Bundestag fire to seize power and install one-party, totalitarian rule? There might be elements within that movement and amongst Trump’s more virulent advisors who would implement something like this strategy (Project 2025 ), but I am not convinced that America is on a 1933-knife edge. As I noted above, I think that there is simply too much organized opposition to Trump and too much of a mass basis of resistance to any overt moves to systematically dismantle the constitutional order for him to succeed, even if he were to try.

But I suspect– and of course, I could be wrong– that, just like Trump’s first term, his bark would be worse than his bite, and that his supporters, save the most rabid, also think that way. Like people laughing at a politically incorrect joke they take some of his more extreme bluster with a grain of salt, making his most vociferous critics sound like prigs with no sense of humour. People might be naive when they dismiss Trump’s threats, but I think that it is true that critics of Trump still often misunderstand his tactics: he makes outrageous claims (for example, that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio), not because he thinks that they are true, but because he knows it will make his opponents apoplectic, and he can then use their reaction to make the real move that he wants to make. The real — and politically effective– move that Trump wants to make is to paint his opponents as people who do not care about, are actively opposed to, the material interests of the “ordinary American.” So, he will say something for which there is no evidence and, when the absence of evidence is pointed out (as it was, in real time, about the cats and dogs, during the debate) he pivots. He does not admit the falsity of what he says but sows uncertainty- during the debate he shrugged and said “we’ll find out.” But this act is all prelude- what he really wants is for his opponents to rise in defence of the community that he attacks. He wants them to do this so that he can say to his constituency: “see, they care more about “them” than they do you.” He thereby creates a wedge between those who Trump identifies as ‘real” Americans (not exclusively white, it is important to add– “real” Americans for Trump are people who were born in America and vote for Trump) and migrants, whom he portrays as invaders.

But why does his tactic work? Because, like all effective political tactics, it connects with a real element of people’s experience, but it abstracts that element from its historical background causes and proposes a solution which, when analyzed, appears laughably (or damnably) simplistic and unworkable, but is read by supporters as a genuine response to their concerns. During the 2016 election Trump mobilized his base by threatening to ban Muslims from visiting the US and promising to build The Wall all along the US-Mexico border. The Muslim ban did not survive court challenges and The Wall stalled due to its extreme costs and logistical challenges (bark, bite), but they both served Trump’s political aims. His aims were to exploit fears about the link between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism (a link which is real) and people’s belief that illegal immigrants unfairly jump the queue and deprive needy American of resources for which they pay taxes. The Muslim issue is less front and centre in 2024, but the immigration issue remains Trump’s most important mobilizing tactic. It would not work unless it addressed real concerns felt by ordinary people– and not only whites’ concerns, as Trump’s critics are too soon to charge. Black communities are also affected and have expressed frustration that while their needs have been ignored for decades, resources are found almost overnight for migrants.

By careful abstraction, isolation from historical causes, and sloganeered simplicity of solution political realities are constructed out of material reality. Critics have to understand the process of construction and why it is effective: life is short, people suffer when their needs are unmet, and they want them satisfied now. The further down the socio-economic ladder one goes, the more unmet needs there are, making a large subset of those groups fertile ground for recruiting to politicians like Trump. The fact is, Democrats (and social democratic parties in Europe, many of whom have lost badly to far right movements in recent elections) have failed to deliver meaningful socio-economic benefits to their working class constituencies. They are portrayed, and not without reason, as run by effete elites who are afraid to get their hands dirty “doing an Honest day’s work” and despise those who do. They are not interested in criticisms of Trump as a fascist because they are not interested in political theory but the integrity of their communities. They feel that their ways of life are derided and, like people who feel disrespected, lash out defensively. They end up at odds with communities (immigrant workers) with whom they have more in common than the ruling class false saviors for whom they vote. That underlying commonality needs to be the starting point of effective response to the Trump’s of the world.

Instead of demonizing Trump supporters as garbage, Democrats have to start by taking their concerns seriously. It is true, sadly, that some Trump supporters do seem to be beyond the pale: fed a steady diet of on-line right-wing conspiracy theory and closed to any confrontation with counter-evidence, they perhaps cannot be convinced by anything other than a smashing political defeat, and even then, they might still not change their minds. I do not know what per centage of Trump supporters fall into this category, but I believe it is a small minority. The rest (of his working class voters) are motivated by real concerns: there are legitimate questions about fairness when it comes to the distribution of housing and other resources to migrant communities when millions of Americans are unhoused or poorly housed. Climate change is a reality, of that there can be no rational doubt, but, if you are a worker in an industry that is threatened by the necessary energy transition, you might well feel personally threatened and search for a simplistic solution: it is a hoax, and Trump will dispel it.

Effective political argument must begin from the opponent’s premises. As Socrates understood, what matters initially in a political and ethical argument is not whether what the interlocutor believes is true, but that they believe it. Of course, Socrates not only failed to convince his interlocutors, he was sent to the grave for his troubles. It may prove to be the case that too many Trump supporters put themselves beyond the reach of critical political reason, but opponents must try to get underneath the fear, bluster, and anger and encourage Trump’s working class base start to consider problems in a more comprehensive light; to ask themselves if they really believe that a selfish, narcissistic, failed property developer and self-promoter understands their problems and has any concrete plan to solve them?