To begin with, to lay blame, as Tariq Ali does, at the feet
of "Western Powers" for, among other things, the catastrophes of the
Middle East (to take but one example) is surely too blunt and unsophisticated a
position to take, especially for a proper leftist intellectual: surely we
should not think in absolute, monolithic terms like "The West" or
"Western Powers". Usually, such monoliths in leftist critiques (like
from Ali) evince a rage that should more properly be directed specifically to
the United States and its foreign policy blunders, or to other European
nation-states (France? The U.K.?) that have ruinously mucked around Africa and
the Middle East (the US has especial fondness for foible in Latin America, of
course). Using a term like "The West" is dangerously close to that
fascistic language of liquidation, erasure and purgation endemic to
totalitarianisms the world over. Tariq Ali, the eminently cultured British
historian and critic of "The West" (born in Lahore, in British Raj)
easily slides between the specific and the abstract, an elision that one could
easily see transmuted, in his own Marxist utopia, into a morally charged
purgation of the undesirables (those perhaps like myself who still believe,
perhaps naively, in liberal democracy and the need to actually defend it).
But speaking of the defense of liberal democracy: it is
equally sure that its defense on the international stage cannot be undertaken
by support from wholly unalloyed defenders. At the level of those nation-states
like the US, who voice a belief in liberal democracy, one can only hear the
cries of the hypocrite, for how many of those same nation-states defending
liberal democracy have seen to it to invade or interfere in the democratic
processes of other nation-states deemed threatening, for one reason or another
(in Chile, in Afghanistan, in Iran, Iraq, and so on)? This is at the heart of
the many leftist critiques of "The West" now being rehearsed as the
forces of authoritarianism bear down on the Ukraine...
I, however, wish to speak on behalf of the alloyed defenders
of liberal democracy, against the leftist critics and against leftist critiques
in general. Now is not the time to rehearse “The West’s” moral and political
failings—a criticism which is surely just, as far as it goes. (Who can deny the
litany of atrocities, botched invasions, foreign policy blunders and ensuing
"blowback", as the late CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson so famously
warned about the further long-term consequences of the US invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq?) But in the real world of real politics, nothing is
unalloyed, nothing blameless; as that underappreciated defender of democracy,
Benedict Spinoza, pragmatically accepts as necessary in the realm of
statecraft: we're always having to choose between the lesser of two evils. What
is missed in this forced choice is that we must simultaneously choose between
the better of two ideals as we choose between the lesser of the two evils. At
the same time we're choosing between the lesser of two evils in the real world,
we're having to decide which of those evils realizes the better of two ideals
in the world of political ideas. Should we then, as we list the foibles of “The
West” in recent decades also not list, for completeness, the many atrocities
committed by “non-Western” nation-states the world over—some of whom fear for
their “security” as Nato nears? Shall we work through the menu of horrors those
authoritarian regimes have perpetrated against their own people or their
neighbors, they—nearly half the world, as Tariq Ali so carefully reminds us
liberal Western democrats—who were so unified in their silent abstentions in
the recent UN General Assembly convened to issue its denunciation of Putin’s
war of aggression?
It is not only the US and most of Europe who are the (quite alloyed)
defenders of the ideal of liberal democracy; in fact, they are not the real
defenders of it at all so much as they stand in opposition to its direct
negation, its challenger in the Russian Federation. We are not "defending
freedom", nor are we defending liberal democracy per se. We stand, rather,
united to oppose its destruction, its negation at the hands of those
demonstrated illiberal autocrats who want not merely to command and control
their near-neighbors, wresting any potential Nato ally from their borders, but
to also gain in actual geography what they believe only in ideology (that
Ukraine is really Russian, and always has been—a position Tariq Ali himself, by
the way, comes chillingly close to endorsing in his overstuffed erudition in
response to questions following his 2015 LRB Winter
Lecture). And “we” are the other half of the world, the many Western
and non-Western nations and peoples of the planet Earth who desire democracy
over autocracy…
The leftist academic elites love to hate Nato, perhaps only
second to their love to argue for the downfall (or dysfunction) of the American
Empire (which surely is right: the US is a domestic social and political
basket-case). But what about Nato? What about that "Empire"?
Nato is most certainly driven by various political and even
economic aims (if only indirectly) that are not necessarily consistent with the
ideals of liberal democracy. That's not really much of a surprise for a
military organization as such. But equally surely the moral calculus of this
military alliance is clear: it is not an engine for genocide, conquest or the
usurpation of power. It expands through voluntary membership. Who sees Nato as
a "security risk" are those opposed not necessarily to "The
West" (or to the US or Europe even), but those who really fear that their
own illiberal means or dreams might be squeezed by that alliance. In short,
those who find Nato to be a "security concern" are precisely those
who have a lot to loose from a liberal democracy taking root in their own land:
the autocrats, the authoritarians. The list of those abstaining from the (moral)
denunciation of Putin's (I don't say "Russia's") war of aggression
against Ukraine, which Tariq Ali breezily flourishes past his readers' eyes as
evidence of "half the world's" opposition to "The West",
gives us a nice menu of contemporary authoritarianism: China, India, Cuba, etc.
... all led by authoritarians, all uneasy with (or in open hostility towards)
liberal democracy.
And as for that "Empire" the left loves to hate,
the US: it is in the unfortunate position, since the end of the Second World
War, of being the global hegemon, with a powerful and energetic (and even
resilient) economy backed by a powerful military, while also constituting, in
the eyes of the rest of the world, the premier representative of liberal
democracy. But it is also a basket-case, riddled with internal social,
political and socioeconomic discord which its rivals (and enemies) revel in --
and, in the case of Putin's Russia, have even taken pleasure in directly making
far worse (I mean of course the mercenary army of hackers Putin hires to flood
American social media with all manner of disinformation: "fake
news"). It is also a nation that has in a sense committed the original sin
of the modern, technoscientific era: it is the only nation to have dropped
nuclear bombs on another nation, a fascistic imperial monarchy, with dreams of
regional conquest of its own, that was consequently chastened by not one but
two bombs, which left scores of innocent people burned, dead or dying. What,
though, was America's "imperial" dream?
The Marshall Plan, for the restoration of Europe. Germany,
actually de-nazified and demilitarized (the absurd war cries now used by Putin
to justify his invasion of Ukraine ... one justification among a twisted many).
Japan, stripped of its fascism, and turned over to its own governmental affairs
-- only to become in time a once-feared economic rival to the US. But then
what? Fears over the spread of Communism then launch the US on its disastrous
decades-long stretch of interference in the politics of nation-states it
worried would fall out of the liberal democratic-capitalist economic order --
the system saved by FDR and Churchill, but wholly opposed by Stalin. Surely
that system had visible evidence in its favor: the raising of standards of
living; overall economic vitality; fuller employment; bounteous food, clothing
and consumer goods; technological and intellectual innovation. But this heady
dynamo of social, cultural and economic activity, now spreading its influence
like wildfire throughout the globe (the "soft" power the US would
come to wield), would run up against the moral and political limits designed
and imposed by the post-war saviors of this very system. Globalization, and the
"Free Trade" movement, along with its accompanying socioeconomic
philosophy, dubbed "neoliberalism", would produce discontent at home
and abroad, leading to more interference in the political affairs of those sovereign
states not yet brought into alignment with this vision, leading in turn to more
discontent, fueling reaction to its excesses and clear moral failings. The US,
now playing the game everyone else was playing (including China and post-Soviet
Russia), found itself not only as global hegemon but also keeper of the flame
of liberal democracy as it discredited that keepership by indulging its desires
for the "containment" of troublesome communist- or socialist-leaning
nation-states (with their populist uprisings), deemed too unruly for the staid
logic of the new neoliberal order of the day: free-wheeling capitalist democracy
(and anyone willing to play nice with us).
Yet, despite these undeniable facts, despite the twisted
logic of the neoliberal order, in its doubling-down on the cold logic of casino
capitalism, and the persistent failure in the US to explore or experiment with
viable alternatives (or to even consider implementing the mitigations of
northern European-style social democracies, with their tame, but functioning,
socialist principles morally structuring vibrant capitalists economies), the US
along with Europe and much of the rest of the world, not only want some form of
democracy, they want to defend against its opponents. I am not so cynical as to
think that this is not sincerely desired, and I am not so cynical to think that
we who join in this call to support (and even directly defend) Ukraine as a
democracy under siege are not sincerely opposed to the illiberal authoritarians
taking aim at that nation. Why are we not allowed to voice this desire for
democracy? To defend it? To oppose the autocrats? Must we on the Left have to
take upon ourselves the burden of having to chant mea culpas for the illiberal
wrongs of supposedly liberal democratic states, governments, empires, before we
can defend our cherished but imperfectly expressed ideals?
There really is a choice here, as "Manichean" as
some leftists try to dismiss it as: liberal democracy of some kind, joined with
a more or less morally restrained capitalism v. illiberal authoritarianisms of
various sorts playing at the capitalist game, with none of the social and
political openness (capitalist) democracies enjoy. We may certainly desire
radical alternatives to the existing order, and we would be right to do so. But
I prefer to live and work in a society where I have the freedom to think those
alternatives openly (even though it might go ignored or unrecognized, for lack
of interest), to write, publish and think without fear of imprisonment or
death. And I also prefer to live, work and think in a society where we might
debate and protest towards an alternative, where experimentation might be
possible. Indeed, a space (a political, economic and social one) of
experimentation should be our immediate goal, not the restless rehearsal of the
same old critiques of American or European Power (as important as they were,
when they were fresh) -- not especially by those like Tariq Ali who enjoy the
comforts these societies afford. (The timeless irony of these leftist critics
is, as Adorno once observed, that they need the luxury of the liberalism (the "system")
they so astutely subject to critique.)
Which of course brings us finally to the deeper problem with
the left and with much of the academic leftist critiques in general: what have we
to offer, in terms of a positive, affirmative political, social and economic
program? Therein lies the rub, for such is never the design of one mind, or of
many, but the chaotic working out of the contingencies of history, about which
the intellectual, always arriving to the party too late, has the benefit of
lots of hindsight. The comfortable perch from atop of which someone like Tariq
Ali can gaze, critically, against the whole of "The West", and easily
pronounce its (by now well-established) failures only induces one to scrutinize
their own commitments, in theory or practice. And rather than original wisdom,
you find an easy mélange of notions culled from the recesses of intellectual
history: Marxism (but could it ever be democratic?), or, in others, some form
of anarchism, or communalism, and so on. Perhaps one day...
What is so irksome is just the lack of authentic political
will or, more fundamentally, real political theory (that is not fraught with
idealisms of one form or another) on the Left. What is needed is more
experimentation, and the political will that goes along with it as a mobilizing
force. But what is also needed, in my view, is a reconsideration of the
foundation and proper articulation of democracy itself. In terms of a practiced
political and social form, it is by far the one with the fewest years to its name.
Far more time has been spent under the heel of monarchy, or its more recent
incarnation, the despotic authoritarianisms of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Democracy may be an ancient idea, but it is an all-too-young and therefore
all-too-fragile practice, one whose inner potential has perhaps not yet been
fully determined.
One cause of our moral and intellectual failure of imagining
new democratic forms is, perhaps, the contingent political-economic form that
grew up together with it: capitalist democracy, with its morally neutered goal
of the infinite accumulation of accumulating capital (to borrow Wolfgang
Streeck's definition), may well prove to be a very long detour in the history
of democratic social-political arrangements. But surely there are other political-economic
arrangements that, while eschewing the logic of the accumulation of capital as
absolute goal, are nonetheless structured to both meet the needs of its people,
and to be vital and vibrant enough to be "productive", progressive even.
I for one want to give it a fighting chance, and that means we must fight for
it. How? Real politics requires real action, and that means that we must use
force to oppose those who would impose their illiberal ideals on the unwilling.
Surely this means that we ought not to impose it on others, but to lead by the
shining example of the productivity of markets and the freedoms of those
societies. But of course, this is far from the case, as we in "The
West" have sought to impose democracy, certainly capitalist democracy, on
the unwilling. This wrong, however, doesn't justify another and we in "The
West" must be absolutely clear on that point: the undemocratic failings of
the democrats shouldn't be cause to curl up and allow the illiberal autocrats
to take what they want. Absolutely not. We stand, if not specifically, and with
unalloyed moral resolve, for democracy, then we most certainly stand against
the autocrats with their "security concerns". What do we have to
oppose autocracy, if not, under the conditions of a war of aggression, with a
military power to back up our desire for democracy, however flawed, to be
preserved -- as an idea yet to be fully and faithfully deployed for the benefit
of humankind?
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