At a house party in Brussels recently, I found myself trapped in conversation with an Americanised European who had just flown in from Dubai, where he lives.
Most people I hear from who have experience there have little good to say about it, but this global business consultant was insistent.
“Life there is so easy,” he told me, not only because there are no taxes to pay. Food is so cheap, he said with the confidence of a travelling salesman, “I just get Deliveroo all the time.”
I found myself staring into the abyss of the liberal world order, personified: the flawless logic of the market, which measures emancipation by the individual convenience of never having to chop an onion again.
On the exported playground of the American Dream, joy and meaning are reduced to the self-centred commodification of pleasure and ease.
At least for those with sufficient access to global capital to play in it.
When I gently pointed out to him the depths of invisible human toil and ecological distress required to deliver an endless supply of poke bowls, he was sanguine: Whether you’re a winner or a loser in this world, you are where you are meant to be, performing the role that supply and demand have designated for you.
Around the world, the “losers” are increasingly displeased with this arrangement. Historically, this has been fertile ground for both left- and right-wing movements, yet it’s the latter that enjoys structural advantages in mobilising popular discontent.
Whereas the left, broadly defined and on its best days, aspires to a class-conscious internationalism beyond the nation-state, the right is happy to double down on the nation-state in its most racialised form. It leaves the political economy largely untouched, deviating from the liberal one only by stopping the pretence that it is for everyone equally.
From Weimar’s demise to Cold War coups to the European Union’s latest deportation regime, examples abound of how “respectable” champions of rules-based and free-market ideology show little hesitation in turning to right-wing chauvinism to oppose graver threats to the economic order.
The big counterpoint bucking this trend is a statistical outlier. It wasn’t ideological charity that compelled the “arsenal of democracy” to enter the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It was economic and strategic interest, Anglo-American hubris, and a selective understanding of racial supremacy and imperial domination.
If it were up to Henry Ford, the all-American capitalist and Antisemite, transatlantic allegiances may have looked different. If it were up to George Patton, the all-American general and war-monger, the end of fighting Germany would have been merely the beginning of defeating the Red Menace.
(It was only a few years later that Patton’s Pacific colleague advocated a nuclear version of this in East Asia, when killing millions of Koreans the conventional way proved insufficient for US global power projection.)
Although Patton was demoted for his public belligerence, his dream of using German forces as a liberal bulwark against the Communist foe outlasted him, becoming a centrepiece of US Cold War containment policy in Europe.
Nazism didn’t end; it simply came under new management. The US has long shared with Russia a navel-gazing sense of national purpose, but its imperial overlap with Germany is stronger still: a racial order deeply implicated in the accumulation of tech-industrial capital.
All that really separates the era of Fordism from ours of “Muskism” is the absence of mass politics. Without it, there is no popular pressure to squeeze out a pittance of our oligarchs’ wealth for the public good, in exchange for saving the revolution for another day.
That’s how we arrive at app-based food delivery as the high watermark of modernity.
Post-political liberalism that the End of History left us with financed the expansion of, and outsourced decision-making to the alleged move-fast-and-break-things efficiencies of Silicon Valley libertarianism. That, in turn, has developed technologies advanced enough to potentially make much of the population surplus—a mainstay of fascist fantasy.
The US is getting there faster, but Europe is catching up quickly.
The centrist-fascist relationship makes for a reified case study of symbiotic mutualism. The centrists get a bogeyman behind the Brandmauer against which they appear reasonable and professional.
When electoral contests are reduced to the least bad options, you don’t need to run on good ideas—only the spectre of worse ones. Whether it’s Kamala Harris or Emmanuel Macron, the moral panic is enough to make liberals think they’re the resistance and prompt leftists to take one for Team Democracy.
Meanwhile, fascists fill the void left by the collapse of community and the atomised entrenchment of isolation that nearly fifty years of centrist deregulation, deindustrialisation, and austerity have wrought on democratic society. Notably, except when used as Antisemitic code, their argument isn’t “capitalism took your job, your pension, and your social club”.
Instead, it is the oversimplified claim that the brown interlopers are to blame—as if racialised migrants without political or economic power are the big winners of globalisation, rather than finance, consultants, and the mil tech-industrial complex.
This is a framing that centrists can live with because it leaves their pillars of power untouched while providing cover for contaminating the so-called cordon sanitaire with their own brand of securitisation of social ills.
Hey, we’re not racist and fearful, goes the thinking, but our voters are. What can we do?
For as much as the right rails against the neoliberal darlings of free trade and of elite technocracy, these ideological bedfellows have common roots. And despite the right’s mourning of a lost imagined community—in the form of white Christian nationalism, secured by patriarchal norms—it is just as much about elevating the individual as its more polite colleagues.
At the geopolitical level, neoliberal annulment of the social contract becomes a weapon of mass destruction. As we have repeatedly seen, a population need not know where a country is for its government to bomb it.
In between acts one and two of the US and Israel’s deranged tag-teaming of Iran, American network National Public Radio (NPR) saw the need to explain to its erudite listeners, in the slow, non-threatening tone of a remedial school teacher or therapist, who the Shah was. US society may appear more polarised than ever, but if there’s one thing Americans can come together over, it’s blind belief in their own exceptionalism.
In this mode, you can innocently wonder how things got so bad despite being the one in power over how things are. State crimes get reduced to mere “mistakes”. As long as you try not to repeat them next time, it’s all good.
Yet in the Obama-Trump-Biden era alone, it’s estimated that unilateral sanctions—the preferred weapon of American liberal empire—killed nearly six million people worldwide, a historically conspicuous figure that disproportionately affected infants and the elderly.
When privatisation hollows out civic, media, and other forms of literacy, easy answers come to the rescue. It’s not hard to persuade voters to vote against their own interests when they have been denied the intellectual tools to assess those interests.
The same applies to their elected officials.
That’s how you get someone like New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres going to bat for Israel.
The glowing terms with which this 38-year-old representative from the Bronx describes a Hasbara-organised trip to the Holy Land likely reflect more on how bad it was growing up in mould-infested public housing than on how great the falafel is in Tel Aviv.
In the country that gave the world peace through fast food, it’s hardly an uncommon experience.
With a bar that low, Israel starts to look convincingly like the Eden it claims it is, justified to do anything to keep the “jungle” out of it. Not just for them, but for us, too.
I don’t suspect Torres is a genocidal maniac. Or even a Zionist. He just grew up poor, and then participated in a phenomenon that Frantz Fanon traced across the colonial universe: the transformation from a subject of a system of oppression to an agent for or against it.
Whether resisting or collaborating, the structural violence embedded therein finds new manifestations through which to express itself.
That brings me back to our man in Dubai. Who can blame him for making the most of the world as it is?
Western liberalism promotes a particular notion of progress, which means that landing men on the Moon was just a stepping stone to the higher achievement of on-demand food delivery.
Through his positivity, though, I couldn’t help but detect a hint of resignation in the limits of the liberal imagination.
When the history of human civilisation is written, the Roman Empire will have given us aqueducts and a lasting legal system; our imperial order will have given us Uber Eats.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
