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.