I lost my faith in America in the five years between 2000 & 2005.
The theft of the 2000 election in the Supreme Court; the demented response to 9/11 & the failure of the press to question the Iraq war, or even to recognise its reality; and, on top of that, the genuine, free, election of GWB in 2004 — these things shocked me more than the later election of Donald Trump even if they remain less surprising. They established the precedent that elections were naked contests of power in which truth or propriety were immaterial. That period taught me there were no guardrails, and nothing too absurd to be believed by a majority of American voters.
The book that helped me most to understand this at the time was Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong. There were other books about the collapse of the American Empire which were a geopolitical help, though the only journalist I know who saw clearly at the time that the invasion of Iraq would prove an epochal defeat for the US was Neal Ascherson. But the question “How could America do this?” was most clearly answered by Lieven.
His most recent book, Climate Change and the Nation State, is a similar closely argued work of pessimism. But this time the pessimism is global and the contempt for progressive illusions more scalding.
The basic thesis can be put quite simply: To mitigate the effects of the climate crisis enough to survive them, will both demand collective effort and sacrifice. The nearest analogy is the way that nations react in wartime. But the crucial word here is “nations” — because incomparably the most effective form of social organisation is the nation state, which commands loyalty as well as force in a way that nothing else does. So the crisis can only be survived — there’s no question of “solving” or evading it — by the efforts of nation states.
But both Right and Left have been captured by ideologies which make nation states and their loyalties irrelevant. The Conservatives have been captured by capitalism and the progressives by internationalism. Each has inherited one side of the neoliberal /Thomas Friedman synthesis of unbridled globalisation and unfettered capitalism at a time when both halves are exactly what threatens our survival.
These are not two errors which cancel each other out, as the complacent centrist might suppose. They are two errors which multiply each other.
What’s wrong, you may ask, with a global response to what is undeniably a global crisis? Lieven’s response is that there is no global authority to articulate this response. Internationalism is really another term for a successful and stable imperium. The people who believe in it are those who see themselves as part of the global ruling class. It may have seemed in the decade after 1989 that there was such an imperium, and it was America’s. But we know better now.
The political argument is grimly realist: climate change is going to impoverish almost everyone, and to demand corresponding sacrifices. The only precedent is a European democratic wartime economy and the social democracy that grew out of it. That economy flourished even in America until the coming of Ronald Reagan. Lieven has unearthed a wonderful quote from President Eisenhower showing what has been lost since then:
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security and unemployment insurance and eliminate labour laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
But we can’t easily get back there. One trouble is that the social democratic consensus grew out of depression as well as out of war: the New Deal made ordinary voters richer. Any Green New Deal will be more complicated. It will, Lieven writes, “will also require Americans to make sacrifices by paying considerably higher prices for their consumer goods.” And of course consumer goods are supposed in our present arrangements to substitute for every other good.
“Such sacrifice by ordinary people can only be demanded as part of a system of social and national solidarity in which the rich have to pay their fair share, and in which the state guarantees the basic living standards of the population as a whole through social welfare and universal health care.”
The crucial terms in that argument are “social and national”. The only form of society which has ever produced these arrangements on a large scale is the nation state. They alone can combine the force and the popular legitimacy to impose the rules, both formal and informal, which we will need to survive. So the choice is not between internationalism and nationalism but between short-sighted nationalism, and far-sighted. The collapse of the Amazon ecosystem could be a global catastrophe but it will also and above all be a catastrophe for Brazil.
So, what might undermine the nation states which are the only things, he argues, that stand between us and and the apocalypse?
Again, it is the two forces which have brought us to the edge of disaster; unbridled capitalism and unfettered internationalism. Capitalism, in this context, is the march of technology — most recently AI — which means that there will be fewer and fewer jobs that need doing, or for which Labour can exert itself against Capital.
“Artificial intelligence threatens in effect to turn a large part of present middle-class employment as well into unskilled, insecure, part-time labour compared to the skilled permanent labour that can be done by computers. This will create large numbers of the most dangerous political actor in modern history— the unemployed graduate.
This was written in 2019, before the rise of the chatbots, but he is of course right that the deep impact of machine learning goes far beyond the flashy stuff on the surface. I suspect that chatbots will destroy the whole racket of higher education, but that’s another story.
Back to Lieven: Internationalism means the migration crisis:
If the Greens and the left continue their blind ideological commitment to open borders, they will feed white chauvinism, tear their societies apart, and make effective action to limit climate change impossible. …
The contemporary left’s emphasis on individual liberation, identity, selfhood, and victimhood rather than duty, and on the benefits of immigration and diversity rather than community, are also not assets when it comes to asking people to make sacrifices for a common cause.
The whole book can be read as a devastating counterblast to the progressive Utopianism of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future — a book where egregious capitalism is discouraged by an elite corps of undercover assassins, driven by righteous, altruistic rage and vast refugee camps are set up in Switzerland under the auspices of the United Nations.
I don’t want entirely to disparage that book, which opens with a wonderfully vivid scene of a lethal heatwave in a town in the Punjab, where first the offices of the NGOs are looted for their air conditioners, and then the whole population ends up standing in a shallow lake, where they die anyway, all but one man, from the effects of the heat.
This is a prediction as well as a prophecy, and Lieven takes it seriously. He quotes an MIT study which suggests that 70% of the Indian subcontinent will soon see periods of wet bulb temperatures just below the threshold of lethality. 2% do so now. Even if 32 degrees of wet bulb doesn’t kill people directly, it will make work in the open air impossible and work indoors possible only with air conditioning. And air conditioning works as a tiny model for the whole resource crisis: the heat evacuated from private buildings is dumped into the common air outside, and it’s all powered by fossil fuels.
For me the most unexpectedly grim section of the book is the one dealing with the impact of the climate crisis on south Asia. Lieven lived for many years in Pakistan, and sees the failure of the Pakistani state as a dreadful example. But it is India and Bangladesh where his worries really concentrate. The impacts of water shortage, rising sea level, and increasing heat will destroy all India’s hopes of rising out of poverty, he thinks. They may well condemn it to a slide back into ruinous anarchy.
While the other great powers may be able to survive global warming if it remains within the 2- to 4-degree range, this is not true of India.
There is already, he says, a fortified barrier between Bangladesh and India, not to keep out the Bangladeshi army of course, but economic migrants, more than a thousand of whom have been shot trying to get across. This — though he doesn’t mention it — brings to mind the similar Saudi policy against migrants from the Horn of Africa coming up through Yemen.
But what happens when Bangladesh is flooded?
Given the degree of tension and violence already surrounding Bangladeshi migration, any major increase in that migration is bound to fuel further conflict. We know the violence that a few million migrants (or the fear of them) has caused in South Asia. The violence caused by tens of millions might well be on a genocidal scale. It would dwarf the casualties in all the conflicts between India and Pakistan put together. In fact, it would probably dwarf any imaginable conflict in South Asia short of all-out nuclear war. It would also create immense new pressure to migrate to the West.
Lieven at his most pessimistic assumes the uselessness, economically speaking, of a large part of the population both of the world and of individual countries.
This is to be mitigated by UBI within countries or something like that and he gives Qatar and the other gulf states as an example of UBI, although this is not described as such. The problem, of course, is that these solutions rely entirely on the exclusion of those who are not of the favoured nation. UBI is a project that absolutely relies on the nation state to administer it and to police its boundaries. Its “universalism” stops at political borders. Its effect is to make those borders much more important.
In the short term, the Lieven book is a horrible prophecy of the way the Sunak/Braverman government is going, although it also provides a framework within which they can be understood — for if there are no borders, there is no nation state, and if there is no nation to belong to, there is no object for collective sacrifice. That they deny the need for this sacrifice is the real betrayal, I think. They are not fools. They must know they are lying.
In the longer perspective, reading Lieven brings me back to Malthus and his famous quote.
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The report of a provision for all that come fills the hall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, the plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and by the clamorous importunity of those who are justly enraged at not finding the provision which they had been taught to expect.
Perhaps the most important question of the climate crisis is who will die as a result, and where, and how.
At this point I reach for that line from Goethe: “I thank God that I am not young in so thoroughly ruined a world.” Usefully it offers a choice: take it at face value, or consider that he wrote it early in the nineteenth century and yet humanity is still—just about—clinging on.
I don't think 'unfettered internationalism' describes anyone in the US with any sort of power or influence at all.
It is hard not to be pessimistic about climate change, especially as it affects places like South Asia. It's already very bad and only going to get worse. Conversion away from fossil fuels has been accelerating, I think, and there's still much to be done on that. Conversion costs money, yes, but if our government stopped going out of its way to subsidize fossil fuels, that wouldn't be a bad step here.
In the US, the need for more immigration becomes ever more apparent. There are help wanted signs everywhere, and unemployment is at all time lows. It's not internationalism to say that to maintain the proper ratio of employed people to retirees to keep the retirement system afloat, we're going to need more young people than our nation is producing. And look, there are a bunch of young people willing to brave a dangerous and stealthy trip across our southern desert for a shot at one of those jobs with a help-wanted sign. We need to build more housing, which means we need more construction workers, and on it goes.