“It's the end of the world. Again. Liberal-democratic Europe, having been abandoned by its American overlord, must now (so say its leaders) fulfil its destiny by vanquishing a twin-headed monster. The first head is the Trump-Putin dyad, united in their loathing of Ukraine and the European Union; and the second, the cabal of Silicon Valley predators threatening humanity.
‘The new axis of the world is Trump-Putin,’ declared Jean-Yves Le Drian.
“The essayist Giuliano da Empoli's argument in brief is that authoritarian leaders are conspiring with the all-conquering tech oligarchs to introduce ‘an era of limitless violence’. Against such opponents, ‘defenders of liberty appear singularly ill-prepared.’ His regret over this perhaps draws on personal experience; before the ‘age of predators’, there was an Edenic era of social-liberalism and the ‘third way’, whose leading lights included Matteo Renzi and Romano Prodi, both advised by da Empoli. Their brilliance so delighted Italian voters that within a few years the country became Europe’s first neo-fascist state.
“Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor painted a picture of ‘end times fascism’ sweeping through society… The only viable politics, Klein and Taylor write, is to build ‘an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a liveable future for us all’.
“Such a framing undoubtedly guarantees that the vast majority of people are positioned on the ‘good’ side of the barricade – more even than the ‘99%’, whom the left so optimistically counted on in the early 2010s.
“The perception that the educated elites are inevitably linked to class privilege, contempt for ordinary people and cultural progressivism continues to weigh like a millstone round the neck of the left. By harping on about the need for manual workers to upskill (‘What you earn depends on what you learn,’ President Clinton liked to repeat) – only to then sacrifice them to offshoring – it denied non-graduates the right to a decent life and fuelled reactionary attacks on universities, institutions which are widely seen as the breeding ground for an arrogant, rootless elite.
“So do we now find ourselves in a world where Marxists and Tocquevilleans can rally together against barbarism? Earthlings unite against space monsters? Advocates of embracing the lesser evil are again calling on every faction of the left to come together under their banner to defeat Trump and his lackeys. But what’s the programme? It’s rarely wise to fight on the turf your opponent picks, but it’s even worse to be defined by them – falling into a form of unreflecting partisanship that leads to opposing everything they support and defending everything they attack. That leads to cheerleading for globalisation as a counter to Trump’s mobster protectionism; backing a war economy in support of Ukraine to counter something as welcome as US disengagement from Europe; and advocating pre-emptive censorship of digital platforms against freedom of speech and its excesses.
“And so the ad hoc alliance of the ‘least worst’ is preparing yet another great leap backward. Its supporters are already rewriting the story of the free-trade past as though it were a lost paradise (see It’s time for the Teamsters and turtles to reunite, in this issue). They miss the time when Silicon Valley, the Democrats and the Pentagon were building a surveillance society and digitising social life at breakneck speed. They mourn the decades when the US humiliated Europe (though less boorishly) through extraterritorial sanctions, data predation and industrial asset theft. Nostalgia has switched sides. Having ceded the future to its adversaries, part of the left is now convincing itself that – however bad they seemed then – things used to be so much better.”
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