The World Order is Dead! Long Live the World Order!
Scenes from the unsuccessful US-China Summit in Anchorage last month (c/o Frederic J. Brown/AFP)
A Response to Patrick Deneen (“Community of Communities,” The Point 22, June 2020)
IN 1984, the great anti-war polemicist Jonathan Schell declared a “consensus, among so many of those who have thought deeply about the [nuclear] predicament, that nuclear weapons cannot be abolished unless world government is established….” Today, a similar sentiment seems increasingly to prevail in left-liberal circles regarding the defining civilizational threat of our own time, the environmental crisis. Nuclear disarmament and climate mitigation follow similar contours. The central dilemma of each is that no state will willingly give up its comparative advantage (in missiles, in carbon-fueled economic growth) and the anarchy of the international system means that no political arrangement exists to force states to do what they will not voluntarily. The continued absence of such an arrangement does not mean that we will annihilate each other with nuclear weapons, nor that runaway climate change will render our present level of civilization unviable. But it does mean that there will remain a constant possibility that those things will come to pass, and only the institution of a world-wide political regime will guarantee an end to this dismal uncertainty.
Our unprecedented moment of need for global governance could hardly have come at a worse time. It has coincided with what is increasingly acknowledged to be the final death, in 2016 or thereabouts, of the American-led international system that, short of being a global government, nonetheless ordered the world with remarkable efficacy from the time of Roosevelt to the time of Trump. The so-called unipolar moment, in which that system found its apogee, is now fracturing into a multipolarity that only global war or Chinese economic collapse can avert. Yet if we are to have any hope of addressing the environmental crisis, to say nothing of the slow-motion cataclysms of global inequality and technological (un)governance, it is evident that some new form of global sovereignty, some “new world leviathan," will have to emerge out of this atmosphere of chaotic indeterminacy. The key question, even more than that of what form this new supra-national arrangement will take, is: at what cost will it be purchased?
If Patrick Deneen is to be believed, that cost may be so high as to be prohibitive—at least on the evidence of the previous iteration of world order. In his critique of the hundred-year arc of the liberal globalist project, Deneen reveals a subtly of understanding that few advocates of the two leading strains of contemporary conservatism, the faux-liberal market fundamentalism of Mitt Romney and the faux-populist cultural fundamentalism of Donald Trump, can claim to share. In his quest for a Third Way positioned between these extremes, Deneen adopts an orientation akin to that which Mark Lilla has attributed to the burgeoning group of French intellectuals surrounding Marion Maréchal (formerly Maréchel-Le Pen), niece of Marine and the heir apparent of the French nationalist right. These thinkers, Lilla writes, have the virtue of intellectual consistency because they oppose “uncontrolled fluidity” in both its “neoliberal and cosmopolitan forms.” They are equally disturbed by unconstrained market capitalism and unconstrained pronoun usage, both of which they see as destructive to the nuclear family and to traditional values. Their chief bogeyman is the European Union, which they argue has subordinated Europe’s traditional social foundations to a transnational ideology of mass human migration and equally peripatetic capital. Theirs is a conservatism that, to its credit, tries to be faithful to its eponymous aim: it seeks to conserve, and is anti-revolutionary in every sense.
Like his French counterparts, Deneen strives to reinvigorate the local identities and communities (dare we say “networks of care?”), centered on the institution of the family, that have been distorted beyond recognition by the pace of economic upheaval and cultural change. His call for a “community of communities” is set against the myriad pathologies he diagnoses in the prevailing liberal social order: the concentration of capital in a few coastal cosmopolises, the accrual of power to unaccountable multinational corporations, the widespread cult of belief in empty careerism as the highest good, and the gradual shift away from religion and the traditional family as the organizing principles of moral life. In liberal globalism’s insatiable quest to transcend the parochial and particularistic, it destroys the fabric of our communities and upends our “rich associational life,” a marvelous phrase that sounds like something out of the young Marx. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.
Indeed, what is remarkable about Deneen’s analysis is how much it is coincides with that of the modern left. He fully grasps the irony of so many professed conservatives declaring fealty to such revolutionary, world-upending phenomena as financial capitalism and global free trade. His belief that government intervention will be required to correct social imbalances that are themselves the product of past governmental intemperance coincides with the growing literature on the left that seeks to reinterpret “neoliberalism” as a fundamentally statist project that hijacked the state’s regulatory apparatus to expand the market into every area of life even while insulating it from democratic accountability. Most importantly, central to Deneen’s analysis is the conviction that the relentless rhythm and individualist ethos of global capitalism have degraded the “communities…in and which our individuality is constituted.” The civic republican spirit inherent in such a view is as refreshing as it is surprising coming from a self-described “national conservative.”
Deneen perhaps doesn’t go far enough in criticizing the explicitly transnational dimension of liberal globalism’s pitfalls. In an essay from 1996, the historian Tony Judt, himself a lifelong social democrat, vividly contrasts the archipelago of “super-regions” that had benefited enormously from European integration with the relative stagnation in the large swaths of land between them. In the triangle between Saarbrücken, Metz, and Luxembourg, Judt observed, German, French, and Luxembourgish businessmen thought little of transiting, sometimes multiple times daily, what until recently had been hard borders to both goods and people (to say nothing of being the site, just decades earlier, of the most fearsome ethno-conflict in human history). No doubt they felt they had more in common with each other—affluence, multilingualism, mobility—than with most of their own countrymen, with whom they shared little besides a collective memory that was increasingly hard to make out against the blinding glow of technical abundance and new possibilities. They were those fortunate few for whom history had indeed ended, while for everyone else it groaned on.
In effect, one result of globalization has been that transcending the nation state construct strengthened certain communal bonds at the price of fatally weakening many others, and which category a given grouping was likely to fall under depended, as ever, on the co-determining variables of culture and class. To “Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor” was added the new phenomenon of boundless cosmopolitanism and opportunity for the global rich, rooted stagnation and diminishing prospects for the global middle and working classes, who today form the constituencies of the Le Pens, Orbans, and Putins of the world. Indeed, it is a fact too little pointed out that most of the major separatist movements on the continent of Europe today (Catalonian, Flemish, Lombard) are essentially movements of the richest segment of a national population wanting to free itself of the burden of supporting the poorer half (Castilian, Walloon, Southern Italian) in order to participate more fully and immediately in the transnational European polity. Success in the liberal world order is increasingly defined not by how well one supports one’s community, but by how quickly one leaves it.
Smog over a steel mill in Inner Mongolia, China (c/o Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
The events of the last decade have once again thrown into relief the Greimas squares of global political-economic orientation. The far right populism that has come to the fore is most accurately understood, not as the opposite of global capitalism, but as its inverse, its dark reflection, its dialectical companion, its repressed id. The ideologies of Romney and Trump, who have lately clashed so publicly, are nonetheless in a hidden symbiosis. Unfettered capitalism generates, if not the material negation Marx dreamed of, then its ugly idealist cousin—petty authoritarianisms that reject the the enlightenment’s values while essentially accepting the economic system it produced. To truly negate far-right populism (to move diagonally, rather than laterally across the Greimas square) requires escaping the manic cycle of unfettered liberalization and neofascist reaction. To accomplish this, we will presumably need an emancipatory politics whose shape and standard-bearer have not yet emerged. Can Deneen’s untried conservative Third Way be that politics?
Let me suggest two reasons why I believe it cannot. The first is that Deneen’s conservatism aims to combat material problems with immaterial values. Deneen is right to draw attention to the psychological dimension of liberal hegemony, and is in good company—Michael Sandel, for example, has recently written of the risk of “the myth of meritocracy” becoming an internal ideological justification for the continued dominance by managerial class (and, by the same token, saddling the poor with the blame for their own prolonged inferiority). But it is simply not the case that “a change in ethos” is needed “more than any political policy” to combat the social ills that modern capitalism has engendered. Today, the indigent, laid-off former steel worker encounters the demagogic populist politician and is offered, not an actual remedy to his situation, but a seductive cocktail of values and enmities: patriotism, racial resentment, traditionalist mythos, a hatred of the lowly immigrant and the cosmopolitan élite alike. To this aestheticization of his political reality, Deneen counter-offers a competing set of values: “honor, sacrifice and gratitude.” This is not the way to defeat the reactionary right; it is playing their game, and playing it with considerably less panache and a fatal excess of propriety. Only a direct, structural remedy for the very real material problems that Deneen identifies can root them out at their source, rather than merely fretting about their consequences. That the party of “It’s the economy, stupid” seems equally imperceptive of this fact as the party of “Make America Great Again” shows just how unsatisfactory our political representation have become.
The second failing of Deneen’s worldview is that, whatever the value of “communities of communities,” they are not the units of political power that will allow us to confront the challenges of the 21st century. The future Deneen imagines will be one of supportive families, reinvigorated spirituality, and former coastal metropolises several feet under water. No network of parochial communities, however noble and generous its conception, will remain so long when faced with the prospect having to absorb two billion climate refugees. Deneen’s concluding flourish, which he frames as a call for political “humility,” includes a telling oblique reference to William F. Buckley’s famous charge that radical political movements are guilty of “immanetizing the eschaton,” or trying to bring about the reign of God on earth before the prophesied time. To bring heaven down to earth by “perfecting” humanity has indeed been the tragic intention behind many of the epochal catastrophes of the last hundred years, from Hitler’s Neuordnung to Pol Pot’s Year Zero. But if Deneen thinks that local sovereignties are sufficient to confront the unprecedentedly, fundamentally cosmopolitan (in the most literal sense of the term) challenges of 21st century, then he is guilty of something worse than the utopian hubris he pins on advocates of renewed global sovereignty. He is naïve. As with our successful avoidance of nuclear calamity during the Cold War, if we manage to avert the ravages of climate change without a new synthesis of transnational political authority, we will have done so principally out of luck, by blundering our way into acceptable half-solutions rather than by any positive merit of our own. We should not be so fortunate; the inherent logic of the scenario points to the opposite outcome. That is not a risk we can afford to take twice.
Deneen claims his national conservatism is the conservatism most worthy of the name. And it is certainly true that self-identified Leninists like Steve Bannon and rapacious free marketeers like Charles Koch can have little claim to be interested in “conserving” anything. But if the goal of one’s political ideology is to live up to the moniker of conservation, then one risks constructing a mighty edifice around a great intellectual emptiness: conserve what? And in every generation, the answer is more or less the same: conserve that which served us well yesterday, or, more likely, that which we tell ourselves served well in some mythologized, imaginary notion of yesterdays. We should not forget that William F. Buckley leveled his eschatological charge not only against Communists and Nazis but also against Civil Rights leaders and Freedom Riders, whom he admonished for trying to destroy the distinctive communal identity of the American South by forcing it into sync with an alien paradigm of social change. If China and the United States were to announce tomorrow that they had reached an agreement to seed the skies with artificial clouds and make hundreds of millions of people give up their gas-guzzling personal vehicles, and Buckley were alive to see it, can anyone doubt that he would greet the news with the same contemptuous dismissal that he did the forced integration of the South? Conservatism is seldom adequate to meet the moral exigencies of its time because it is basically a negative proposition: it rejects change above all, and in moments when the status quo becomes unsustainable, it flounders. Its fundamental instincts can without much modification be used to justify the preservation of serfdom in the face of nascent capitalism as the preservation of capitalism in the face of nascent ecological disaster.
Deneen is right to want to safeguard and nurture the communal ties that support our human flourishing. He is justified in his critique of the prevailing iteration of globalist politics, which has subjected those ties to pressures that threaten to disfigure them permanently. But he fails to see that without a better world order and a new mode of global politics equal in scope to the global threats we face, then there will be nothing worthwhile left to conserve. Deneen is wrong to think so unambitiously. The liberal nation-state is not too much; it is not nearly enough.