The new decade
The pedant in me would say that the new decade doesn't actually begin until 2021. But then you'd all throw rotten fruit and veg at me, so in this case I'll go with the common wisdom.
Our decade in this country began with the blowout of 2010, when a nation enraged at being given a guarantee of healthcare turned against Barack Obama and the Democrats. And it got worse from there.
We've been buffeted by the winds of populism, fascism, and know-nothingism. The Western world has had a collective conniption at white no longer being right or might.
Barack Obama barely held things together as the world started to spin apart. The world order he led was under sustained attack by enemies, both foreign and domestic, who saw it as an impediment to their own grandeur. Things more or less chugged along—Russia contained, China kept within bounds, populism on a low simmer—until the Catastrophe of 2016. That year saw the dual Russian intelligence operations which brought about Brexit and Donald Trump's installation. It saw a useful idiot in Bernie Sanders kneecap Hillary Clinton, and aid and abet Trump's "win". It and the years around it saw fear take hold in various parts of the world, from Hungary to India to Israel to the heartland. One could be forgiven for thinking that the world had forgotten George Santayana's warning.
The great and the good are warning that liberal democracy is on the back foot. That powers like China and Russia (well, mostly China) are the future. That nationalism, populism, and revanchism are the orders of the day. The liberal democratic order had its day, but it was unable to secure its Cold War victory.
Hogwash.
I'm not one given to strident declarations. But if there's anything for which I would take up arms it is a liberal democratic order.
Liberal democracy brought us civil rights. It brought us women's rights. It brought us minority rights. It brought us the eight hour work day and work benefits. It brought us the defeat of fascism and communism. All—ALL—progress of the last century has been a result of liberal democracy, and of the people who powered it in the face of strident opposition.
The handwringers among us envision a Nineteen Eighty-Four dystopia ahead of us. Or, at best, a Brave New World dystopia, where the masses will be made soporific by easy entertainments (without, at least for now, the genetic engineering).
They do not see the Sardines in Italy, who protest and organize against the rise again of Italian fascism. They don't see the Greens in Germany, who have taken over from the sclerotic Social Democratic Party, and may produce Germany's next chancellor. They don't see the Hindus protesting against the Hindutva laws promulgated by the Hindu fundamentalist BJP in India, stating that no, India will not be a religious state, but the secular state envisioned by the Mahatma. They don't see the women of Sudan who toppled a misogynistic, racist dictator. They don't see electoral success after electoral success for the maligned Democratic Party in the US, as people rise up and renounce the abomination ushered in by 2016.
Liberal democracy is the cause in which I believe, because it is the only cause in human history which has brought peace and uplift to the mass of humanity. Communism didn't. Fascism didn't. Liberal democracy, and the regulated capitalist economy which underpins it, is the only system which can free peoples, which can uplift nations.
Elections aren't enough. Russia has elections. It's a mafia state.
In Lebanon, the people are rising up, realizing that the confessional arrangement is stifling them, holding them back. And the confessional arrangement is lashing out. But people know. They know that there is a better way than oligarchy and sectarianism.
In Iraq, poor, battered Iraq, there have been massive, bloody protests at the same sort of confessional arrangements, and the economic sclerosis attendant on them.
I will say it now: This decade will be the decade when the mass of humanity casts off fear. It will cast off of the love affair with strongmen and autocrats who promise to return them to glories they never had. They have failed all this time, while maintaining their power.
There will still be those, of course, who cling on to that fear. That is who they are. But most people don't want to live in constant conflict. They just want to get on with their lives. We see this in the thousands of young Russians who are fleeing the country, not wanting to live in an autocracy. They are voting with their feet. But those who remain will vote with their bodies.
The fact is this: the long human civil war of the 20th century is still going on. The questions thrown up by the two world wars have yet to be resolved. Our fallacy was in thinking that 1989 was a turning point. No. It was merely a new phase. We are still in the war begun in 1914. It is up to this generation to finally resolve it, and to resolve it in a manner which will benefit the bulk of humanity.
I have an innate sense of fatalism. But I also realize that in my life the things to which I've set my mind I've accomplished. So, no, I don't fear this new decade. This will be the decade humanity finally matures. This will be the decade humanity becomes a global civilization, with myriad, beautiful local variations. People want peace. People want hope. And they will have it.
Happy New Year, everyone.