Nationalism and Liberalism: Can this Marriage Be Saved?
Issue 7
"Nationalism is the most potent form of identity politics." So writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the world's great policy intellectuals. With 2024 a banner year for elections across the world, Mehta asks whether liberalism stands a chance in battle with its political nemesis: nationalism. Compact's Geoff Shullenberger then deepens these themes (and intensifies the contradictions) in his lapidary review of the so-called anti-woke publishing boomlet.
Power to the people, right on. The political theorist Wendy Brown, in a podcast, takes on one of the most fundamental themes of politics-- power-- which builds on her critique of neoliberalism and her reading of Max Weber. Moving from Weber to Marx, we spotlight the Marxist intellectual phenom, Kohei Saito, as he rummages through our climate crisis and arrives at one major culprit: capitalism. Corey Robin follows by eulogizing the esteemed European intellectual historian, Arno Mayer, a devotee of both Marx and Weber, and a distinctive and countervailing voice in the history wars this past half-century.
Marzio G. Mian reports from Russia, something few have thoughtfully done (for good reason) in the recent past. The forever debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers seems to have reached a consensus around the former and all that that entails. His “travelogue” speaks volumes about the current state of play. Also speaking boldly is Chas Freeman's UnHerd essay, which offers a rectitudinous realism of the first rank. But, as Iris Murdoch would have said, are the conclusions valid?
Our music selection comes from the indefatigable and nonpareil Tom Zé. The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, still performing in his late 80s, was the avant-garde of an itself advanced guard, the Tropicalia movement in 1960s/70s Brazil. If you don't know his oeuvre, may this gentle piece light the way.
-- Leonard Benardo, senior vice president for the Open Society Foundations
1. The Specter of Nationalism – Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Foreign Policy
“The foreboding that accompanies the world’s elections in 2024 stems from one singular fact: The uneasy accommodation between nationalism and democracy is coming under severe stress.”
Nationalism and liberalism are often in tension with regards to four key issues that underlie the nationalist crisis of democracy: "how nations define membership; how they popularize a version of historical memory; how they locate a sovereign identity; and how they contend with the forces of globalization. ... Democracies tend to navigate this tension rather than resolve it. Yet, around the world, nationalism is slowly strangling liberalism—a trend that could accelerate in a damaging way this year. As more citizens cast their ballots in 2024 than in any other year in the history of the world, they will be voting not only for a particular leader or party but for the very future of their civil liberties.”
“Nationalism is the most potent form of identity politics. It views individuals and the rights they have through the prism of the compulsory identity to which nationalism confines them. Nationalism and liberalism have long been competing forces. It is easier to navigate the tension between them if the stakes around nationalism are lowered, not raised. ... Advancing forms of nationalism that do not allow their own meaning to be contested or that seek to preserve the privilege of particular groups generally produces a more divisive and polarized society.”
2. The Poverty of Anti-Wokeness – Geoff Shullenberger, Compact
The anti-racist intelligentsia that came to prominence in the 2010s accompanied its pessimistic conclusions regarding structural racism in U.S society with frenzied activity and demands upon “white America.” The woke movement, in turn, provoked a counter “slew of polemics against progressive identity politics” that generally argue “that what occurred over the past decade was, above all, a process of elite radicalization that redounded to the benefit of well-positioned professionals who turned identity into a currency of social advancement.” Opposition to the new progressive identity politics has been hazardous for liberals, but advantageous for conservatives.
“The fact that the right and left alike are currently mobilized to assert competing claims to victim status points to a bitter truth: Identity politics isn’t going anywhere. Appeals to identity to extract limited concessions from power will likely be deployed more than ever in the years to come by members of all political factions. This is especially true as long as America lacks both an economic settlement that benefits ordinary people and a compelling account of shared national purpose. Wokeness, in mistaking some of the particulars of American history for a metaphysical condition, has helped make the past decade of politics particularly toxic and futile. Anti-wokeness, in confusing symptoms of America’s degradation for causes, has failed to offer any real alternative.”
3. Power: Contemporary & Neoliberal – Wendy Brown, Social Science for Public Good
Political theorist Wendy Brown dissects the multidimensional nature of power in a neoliberal world, emphasizing the need for nuanced conceptions of power beyond traditional sovereign or repressive views and highlighting how neoliberalism reconfigures subjectivities and institutions, undermining democratic practices.
“What Foucault was alert to--and I don’t think he invented this theory of power; I actually think theorists like Marx and Weber are important antecedents to this theory--what he was alert to was the extent to which we late moderns still tend to talk about power as if it’s held by an individual or an institution and wield it or used over those without it. And that it is a substance, or as he put it, a commodity. That’s one view of power that he wanted to take apart. And then another view of power that he wanted to take apart was that power simply represses, that it holds us down, and that if you get rid of it, you are free. Put together, what he was challenging was the idea of what he rightly called sovereign power ... the idea is that power is held by one and transferable to another, or is contained in institutions, and also that it is simply used to hold things down or repress, or extinguish or destroy even. ... there is a whole lot of power in the modern and late modern world that doesn’t work like that. That works through what he called rationality, forms of reason, that works through what he called governmentality--that is, the governing of our conduct not necessarily by a government, but all kinds of things ranging from organization of space to forms of reason, norms, etc. And that power ... will allow us to understand how subjects come into being and are conducted by power without the state or the police ever pointing a finger or threatening their lives. And I think ... that there is a tendency on the Left to acknowledge this on the one hand ... but on the other hand to disavow it when it comes to major structure. To continue to imagine that there are the powerful and the powerless ... rather than the work that many of us have been engaged in, understanding something like neoliberalism as bringing into being subjects that do not need to be threatened overtly at all to become perfect neoliberal operators, to self-invest, to self-enhance their value, to imagine that what they have to do in life is nothing but continue to try to keep their value up and keep it from depleting and that is not a subjectivity or way of being that occurs because something is threatening them overtly.”
4. The Green New Deal Is the Opiate of the Masses – Kohei Saito, The Nation
Capitalism is at the root of the climate crisis, according to Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito, who believes Marxism provides a useful framework for understanding the Anthropocene. He argues against small-scale measures for individuals to combat climate change – think reusable shopping bags – and cautions that there are limits to the sustainability of green economies, instead pushing for “degrowth Communism.”
“It will be impossible to truly combat climate change if we all fail to participate, as directly interested parties, in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living. The only way to avoid this trap is to disengage from a consumer culture that equates car ownership with independence, while also reducing the volume of everything we consume. We must make a major incision into capitalism itself to heal the world. It might sound counterintuitive, but the goal of any Green New Deal should not be economic growth but rather the slowing down of the economy. Measures to stop climate change cannot double as ways to further economic growth. Indeed, the less such measures aim to grow the economy, the higher the possibility they’ll work.”
5. Without End – Corey Robin, Sidecar
The recently deceased historian Arno Mayer was “the most heterodox of Marxists, a practitioner of what he called social history from above,” which he used to narrate Europe’s trajectory, with a focus on broad context rather than singular events. Mayer himself emphasized how his Jewish origin in Luxembourg pushed him towards a cosmopolitan worldview, but Robin emphasizes his focus on the internal workings of epochs, his tendency to get to the center of issues and “connect across the perimeter.”
"Perhaps Mayer’s most proleptic – and, not coincidently, least discussed – idea is that of vengeance. It emerged late in Mayer’s career, I think, in his work The Furies (2000). Seeking to counter the revisionist consensus on the French and Russian Revolutions, which held that ideological utopianism fuelled their descent into violence and terror, Mayer claimed that each side of the struggle, the revolution and the counterrevolution, was inspired by a desire for vengeance, to retaliate against longstanding injuries and more recent acts of violence. While the revolutionary side sought to impose what Michelet called a ‘violence to end violence,’ to create a new form of sovereignty that would stop the wilding in the streets and bloodshed in the countryside, it soon discovered what Clytemnestra and Orestes realize in The Oresteia: every attempt at one final act of violence only sets the stage for the next.
“For years, I read Mayer’s account of vengeance as merely an attempt to salvage utopian thinking from the dead hand of the Cold War. More recently, I’ve come to think of it as an uncanny description of what was to come, of what solidarity and animosity look like after the Age of Ideology or the Age of Revolution or the Age of Utopia has come to an end.”
(For more on Mayer, see Enzo Traverso’s article in the New Statesman.)
6. Behind the New Iron Curtain – Marzio G. Mian, Harpers
Russian history weighs heavily on its national “identity today, as the country continues to look backward, sifting its vaunted past for new myths of grandeur. It seems prepared to resist and to suffer, acts at which Russians have always excelled, and to have resigned itself to a future of isolation, autocracy, and perhaps even self-destruction,” writes Mian, traveling along the Volga and offering a rare glimpse of a Russia that has become another planet thanks to the war and restrictions on foreign journalists.
“To think that the anti-Western ideas coursing through the country’s veins are simply the fruits of regime indoctrination would be to overestimate Putin—and to ignore what has driven Russia throughout its history, at least since the time of Peter the Great: a fascination with the West, paired with a proud and slightly overbearing defense of its own vast territory and resistance to assimilation. Russians have always vacillated between wanting to be included and fearing contamination or corruption, from harboring an inferiority complex to delusions of grandeur. It’s a clash that could be understood in terms of the intellectual conflict between the pro-Western Turgenev and the Slavophile Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, we’re no longer cruising at that altitude. There is arguably even less debate today than in the days of the USSR, and it’s clear that Russians are now more fully in a Dostoevsky phase: their desire to lock themselves in a small but boundless world is reemerging, even among those who reject Putin and the Orthodox Church’s revanchist narrative.”
7. The propaganda that damned Ukraine – Chas Freeman Jr., UnHerd
The so-called fog of war has never been as thick as it is with the Ukraine War, with propaganda machines on all sides working overtime. But the war, marked by miscalculations, has led to catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, with a significant loss of life, population, and territory, that requires a radical rethinking of policies by all involved parties. The war has not achieved its stated objectives for any side. Russia faces significant opportunity costs, the U.S. has failed to weaken Russia, and Ukraine is being destroyed. Diplomatic efforts must focus on achievable peace aimed at coexistence between Kyiv and Moscow.
“If the purpose of war is to establish a better peace, this war is not doing that. Ukraine is being eviscerated on the altar of Russophobia. At this point, no one can confidently predict how much of Ukraine or how many Ukrainians will be left when the fighting stops or when and how to stop it. Kyiv is already struggling to meet its recruitment goals. Combating Russia to the last Ukrainian was always an odious strategy. But when Nato is about to run out of Ukrainians, it is not just cynical; it is no longer a viable option.”
(See also Anatol Lieven’s article in Responsible Statecraft arguing that “As the war drags on, the Russians will slowly gain advantages and reduce any leverage Kyiv may have in peace talks ... There is still time for Ukraine to win a qualified victory against Russia; but only if the United States commits itself strongly to a compromise peace.”)
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Outstanding
Viva Tom Zé!!!