The anti-globalizers (whose most prominent face was Naomi Klein) seemed to me to lack a coherent critique that would preserve the best of international cosmopolitanism while getting away from the neoliberal version of globalization. The anti-globalizers seemed to me nationalist, parochial, reactionary, and patronizing toward developing nations. It's revealing that in the late 1990s, thiswas the force--not, say, economic disparity within the U.S.--that caught on with privileged disaffected whites. Ralph Nader's presidential run in 2000 came out of this quixotic enterprise.
But recall too that in that same period debt forgiveness, unprecedented amounts of aid to poor countries, and a powerful international criminal court were also on the global agenda. The positive side of globalization was beginning to kick in, the human welfare counterpart to the consumer choice dimension already in place. Domestically, reparations to African Americans were a big issue. Capitalism was being pushed, in all sorts of ways and around the globe, in a humane direction, if ever so slightly. This was different than the hipster protest against globalization. Later in the decade the professional protestors would take up the cause of dismantling NAFTA and returning manufacturing jobs to the blighted industrial Midwest.
In the absence of Bush and 9/11, consider the possible directions a movement for social justice could have taken in a freely globalizing world. The mind boggles at the possibilities. The internet, when at last it came into its own, would have had a positive agenda to hang on to, instead of liberals fighting a rearguard action.
In the wake of our own dalliance with fascism, countries like China got a free pass on human rights and social welfare, as they proceeded pell-mell on the hypercapitalist path. Dubai--that corporatized, segregated city-state--has become the paradigmatic urban space, distilling the essence of the desired shift on the part of elites. It's all the more ironic that Lou Dobbs orchestrated a successful anti-Dubai Ports World campaign to halt their acquisition of American ports on the grounds of terrorism fears. While China's rise was a probability in 2001, it was a done deal a decade later; but the way China has evolved, while global discourse took its eyes off equality and justice, is the essence of the story.
Elites were not necessarily threatened by the anti-globalization movement's extempore tactics, but it was possible to see the frustrations evolving into a broader social justice platform. Along with globalization's maturity it was possible to imagine erosion of illegitimate privilege.
If we think of fascism as the extreme manifestation of class war, then Bush's most important domestic agenda items--massive tax cuts for the rich, moves toward privatization of education and welfare, and conversion of the immigration system from family reunification to something more in line with the direct needs of capitalism--make a lot of sense. The philosophical repositioning was fully achieved.
The late-1990s protests, in the midst of prosperity, were fueled by an outburst of cultural elitism. But now that globalization has become a darker force, the class anxieties caused by it have no real outlet--an outcome that is bound to please the elites. We are exactly where it was clear we would end up when the massive tax cuts for the wealthy went into effect a dozen years ago: large deficits leading to reactionary calls for slashing "entitlements." Class war has entered its latest phase of permanent disempowerment of the working majority.
Remember that in the first nine months of 2001, Bush aggressively demolished the emerging cosmopolitan global agenda by opposing the international criminal court, unilaterally exiting from international treaties, violating Chinese sovereignty, and proposing military dominance in space. He shifted the terms of the discussion 180 degrees, so that domestic social anxiety was at first challenged and mocked (even basic environmental rules like arsenic in the water were thrown out), then suppressed and humiliated, and finally redirected toward nationalist aims (this took place after 9/11).
In short, class anxiety was reformulated, turned inward and against some of the most deserving members of the potentially emergent solidarity, i.e., immigrants, who became equalized over the course of the decade with terrorists. At the beginning of the decade, the discourse was about giving full citizenship rights to undocumented people who had established roots in the community, and inaugurating a more open, humane, and rational system; by the end of the decade, the option was off the table, as many millions of people considered self-deportation. Award-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas's story is not uncommon, though the public perception of the undocumented is mostly of menial workers.
When Attorney General John Ashcroft implemented his registration policy for residents from certain countries, hundreds of thousands of people either disappeared into the shadows or left the country. We will never have a full accounting of what happened. When thousands of Iranians in Los Angeles showed up to register, many of them were arrested and put in jail, despite having documentation. Immigrant populations in many cities became decimated (especially non-Mexican immigrants) and have never recovered. Yet the debate continues to become more surrealistic. The Obama administration deported 800,000 people in the last two years (2009-2011), and an unknown number of children who came to this country at a young age and went to public school and college have no recourse to normalize their status. The imbalanced law-and-order perspective toward the human issue of immigration is one of the visible signs of fascism's ascendancy.
There is much economic self-destructiveness, from the elites' point of view, in the narrative I've outlined. I'm not convinced that the financial collapse occurred entirely for the reasons we believe it did; financial capitalism is always at root a pyramid scheme, but it can continue indefinitely, as long as it's moderated from time to time. Could it be that incipient fascism redirected the nation's attention from innovation to (false) security, and therefore threw sand in the gears of the economy, hardened the normal flows of the market and slowed it to the point of negative growth?
If security rather than freedom is the ultimate objective, then at some point the whole apparatus collapses. The myth of perfect immunity becomes too hard to sustain, and greater and greater sacrifices are demanded from the populace to support more militancy, more violence, more state-sponsored terrorism, as has been the experience of every country on the path of fascism. Companies directly invested in homeland security benefit, and some of the wealth trickles down, but war and homeland security have their limits as propellants of economic growth, and this may ultimately be the cause of up to a decade of economic decline.
What compels the elites, then, to bring in a fascist leader, despite uncertainties for the economic order? Only if they perceive a danger greater than the risks involved in legitimizing a force that may exceed their own powers of control will they put the endgame into motion.
The Italian example teaches us that the two years of red anarchy (1919-1920) were a key factor in convincing industrial capitalists, large landowners, and monarchists that Mussolini could be trusted to check the spread of socialism and that, despite the discomfort his own squadristi caused the squeamish among liberals, there was no alternative but to bring him to power. Hence the monarch Victor Emmanuel III invited Mussolini to form the government. Until the murder of socialist opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, Mussolini's power was not complete. After that, however, the state extended its reach even into the realms of cultural activity, assumed a militant posture capped by the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and eventually aligned with Hitler's despicable anti-Semitic laws (for which there was little taste in Italian culture) just before the start of World War II.
Mussolini was the elites' consensual alternative to what was then perceived as the failed two decades of Giolittian liberalism (associated with the dominant politician of his era, Giovanni Giolitti, prime minister for much of the duration). This was the period the policy of transformismo (transformation)--i.e., the conversion of one faction into another, in order to facilitate parliamentary maneuvering and deal making--ruled the day, rather than any principled policy of national greatness, which offended right and left.
In retrospect, to me at least, Giolittian accommodation seems to have been an acceptable way to balance the interests of capital and labor; but hotheads and rebels, which in Italy's case included the Futurist F. T. Marinetti and the decadent aesthete Gabriele D'Annunzio, are always discontent with the apparent (and sometimes real) evidence of shadiness in insider deals.
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