What is the bigger story? The
West Against the Rest or The West Against Itself?
The Illiberal Quartet of Xi,
Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan is in the line of fire of haughty homilies about
Western “values.”
Illiberalism is arrogantly and
provocatively depicted in the West repeatedly as a Tartar Invasion 2.0. But
closer to home Illiberalism is responsible for the social, civil war in the
U.S. as Trump’s America has long ago forgotten what the European Enlightenment
was all about.
The Western view is a maelstrom
of a Judaeo-Greco-Roman, pseudo-philosophy steeped in Hegel, Toynbee, Spengler
and obscure biblical references decrying an Asian attack on the “enlightened”
West’s mission civilisatrice.
The maelstrom stunts critical
thinking to evaluate Xi’s Confucianism, Putin’s Eurasianism, Rouhani’s
realpolitik and “non-Westoxified” Shi’ite Islam, as
well as Erdogan’s quest to guide the global Muslim Brotherhood.
Instead the West give us phony
“analyses” of how NATO should be praised for not allowing Libya to become a
Syria, which it indeed has.
Meanwhile a golden rule prevails
about one Asian power: never criticize the House of Saud, which happens to be
the ultimate manifestation of Illiberalism. They get a free pass because after
all they are “our bastards.”
What the illiberal-bashing frenzy
does accomplish is to reduce what should be a crucial debate about a fearful
West Against the Rest, to the more pressing issue of The West Against Itself.
This intra-West battle is being in manifested in several ways: Viktor Orban in
Hungary, eurosceptic coalitions in Austria and Italy, the advance of the ultra
right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Sweden Democrats. In short
it’s The Revenge of the European Deplorables.
Bannon’s ‘Paradise’ Regained
Into this European fray steps
Steve Bannon, the master strategist who elected Donald Trump and is now taking
the continent by storm. He is about to launch his own think tank, The Movement, in Brussels, to foment no
less than a right-wing populist revolution.
It comes replete with Bannon
spooking assorted EU lands by paraphrasing Satan in Milton’s Paradise
Lost: “I prefer to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Bannon’s growing influence in
Europe has reached the Venice Biennale, where director Errol Morris presented a
documentary on Bannon, American Dharma, based on 18 hours of
interviews with Trump’s Svengali himself.
Bannon held court two weeks ago
in Rome supported by Mischaël Modrikamen, the president of the Popular
Party in Belgium, who is slated to lead The Movement. In Rome Bannon again met
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini – whom he had previously advised “for
hours” to finally break a political coalition with fading star Silvio “Bunga
Bunga” Berlusconi. Salvini and Berlusconi though are now horse-trading again.
Bannon has correctly identified
Italy as the vortex of post-politics, spearheading the crusade to defeat the
EU. The game-changer should be the May 2019 European Parliament elections,
which Bannon reads as a certified victory for Right populism and nationalist
movements.
In this do-or-die battle between
populism and the Davos Party, Bannon wants to play The Undertaker against a
puny George Soros.
Bannon is even seducing cynics in
France by designating self-described “Jupiter” Emmanuel Macron, now in public
opinion free fall, as public enemy number one. A faded U.S. newsweekly declared
Macron to be The Last Man Standing between “European values” and, well,
fascism. Bannon is more realistic: Macron is
“a Rothschild banker who never made money – the definition of a loser…He
imagines himself to be a new Napoleon.”
Bannon is connecting across
Europe because he has identified how the West peddles “socialism for the very
rich and the very poor” and “a brutal form of Darwinian capitalism for
everybody else.” Quite a few Europeans easily grasp his simplistic concept of
Right populism, according to which citizens must be able to get jobs, something
impossible when illegal immigration is used as a scam to depress workers’
salaries.
The political strategy
underlining The Movement is to unite all European nationalist vectors – a
currently fragmented mess featuring sovereignists, neoliberals, radicalized
nationalists, racists, conservatives and extremists on a quest for
respectability.
To his credit, Bannon viscerally
understood how the EU is a vast, de facto “un-sovereignty” space held hostage
to economic austerity. The EU bureaucracy can easily be construed as
Illiberalism Central: It was never a democracy.
There’s no question Bannon
impressed on Salvini the need to keep hammering over and over again how the
Germany-France leadership of the EU is anti-democratic. But there’s a huge
problem: The Movement, and the Right populism galaxy, center almost exclusively
on the role of illegal migrants – leading non-ideological cynics to suspect
this might be little else than State xenophobia posing as a revolt of the
masses.
Meanwhile, in Plato’s Cave…
Belgian political theorist
Chantal Mouffe, teaching at the University of Westminster and a darling of
the multicultural café society, could easily be depicted as the anti-Bannon.
She does identify the “crisis of neoliberal hegemony” and is
capable of outlining how post-politics is all about Right and Left wallowing
together in a conceptual swamp.
The political impasse of the
whole West once again revolves around TINA: There Is No Alternative, in this
case to neoliberal globalization. The Goddess of the Market is Athena and Venus
rolled into one. The question is how to organize a politically strong reaction
against the all-out marketization of life.
Mouffe at least understands that
just demonizing Right populism as irrational – while despising the
“deplorables” – is not good enough. Yet she places too much hope in the fuzzy
political strategy of Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France, or
Bernie Sanders in the U.S. Arguably the only progressive politician in Europe
who has a clear shot at government is Jeremy Corbyn – who’s consuming all his
energy fighting a nasty demonization campaign.
Sanders has just launched a
manifesto calling for a Progressive International – capable of outlining a New
Deal 2.0 and a new Bretton Woods.
For his part, Yanis Varoufakis,
former Greek finance minister and co-founder of theDiEM25 democratic
movement, laments the triumph of a Nationalist International – at
least stressing that they “sprang out of the cesspool of financialized
capitalism”.
Yet he resorts to the same old
players when it comes to pushing for a Progressive International: Sanders,
Corbyn and his own DiEM25.
Mouffe’s conceptual solution is
to bet on what she describes as Left populism, which can be construed as
anything from “democratic socialism” to “participatory democracy”, depending
“on the different national context.”
This implies that populism –
relentlessly demonized by the neoliberal elites – is far from a toxic
perversion of democracy, and can be authentically progressive.
Slavoj Zizek, in The Courage of Hopelessness, couldn’t
agree more, when he stresses that when the masses “not convinced by ‘rational’
capitalist discourse” prefer a “populist anti-elitist stance,”this has nothing
to do with “lower-class primitivism”.
In fact Noam Chomsky, way back in
1991, in Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, had
brilliantly shown how Western “democracy” really works: “It is only when the
threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely
contemplated.”
“So what does Europe want?”
Zizek asks. He holds the merit of identifying the “principal contradiction” of
what he qualifies as “The New World Order” (actually we’re still under the slow
burn of the Old Word Disorder). Zizek succinctly depicts the contradiction as
“the structural impossibility of finding a global political order that could
correspond to the global capitalist economy.”
And that’s why the “change”
spectrum is so limited, and for the moment totally captured by Right populism.
Nothing substantial can happen without a real socio-economic transformation, a
new world-system replacing casino capitalism.
Taking the shadowplay in their
Platonic – Russophobic – cave for reality, while mourning “the end of Atlanticism,” the
champions of “Western values” prefer to adopt a diversionist tactic.
They keep on summoning fear of
“illiberal” Putin and his “malign behavior” undermining the EU, coupled with
“debt trap” neo-colonialism inflicted on unsuspecting customers by those
devious Chinese.
These elites could not possibly
understand they face a plight of their own making, courtesy of free market
populism, which happens to be the apex of Western Illiberalism.
Pepe Escobar is the correspondent-at-large for Hong
Kong-based Asia Times. His
latest book is 2030. Follow him on Facebook.
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