If the World Feels Like It’s Regressing, That’s Because It Is
All around this troubled globe, we’re seeing the rise of a phenomenon as strange as an ice-storm in a desert: the regressive revolution.
We’re used to seeing revolutions as the wheel of human progress only ever turning forwards. But revolutions, more precisely understood, can go either way: the wheel can move backwards, too. Backwards revolutions, luckily, are rarer in the sweep of human history, and if they weren’t, then you and I would probably be stuck in caves, bonded to our plows. Hence, we’ve come to only see revolution as only positive things which enshrine democracy, rights, equality, and so on — like the French Revolution or the American Revolution.
But regressive revolutions happen too, which are often later given names like fascism, authoritarianism, and tyranny — though, in the heat of the moment, the emergence of a new order might be glorified as something more grand and promising.Such was the case in Iran, Venezuela, and post-Soviet Russia, to name just a few.
Today, if we look around the world carefully, we see regressive revolutions popping up, like little pre-cancerous sores, nearly everywhere that we look. Though America is finally making progress, the GOP is still captured by Trumpism. Then there’s Britain, which isbecoming a failed state by the day. There are themanfluencers peddling hyperpatriarchal viewsof men and women. There’s theanti-vaxxers, theincels, thefar right gaining ground across the globe, from China to India to Italy to even European strongholds of social democracy, like Sweden. There’s the Creepy Billionaire Who Bought Twitter,turning it into a playground of hate. I could go on and on.
But what are these revolutionsagainst, precisely? Because just as progressive revolutions are for something — freedom, defined precisely as the abolition of feudalism, like the French revolution, for example — then, too, regressive revolutions are against something else. What is that something?
Today’s anti-revolutions are essentially revoltsagainst neoliberalism. Though it might have “lifted billions out of poverty” in the East — and even that is a notion which smacks of hubris, for the truth is the Chinese and Indians, by carefully choosing variants of managed capitalism, played more than a small role in their own ascendance — it also left hundreds of millions in the West facing something like an existential traumatic shock: not just the loss of their livelihoods, but of their very existences — their towns, communities, social bonds, values, norms, and sense of safety, stability, meaning, purpose, and worth, as providers, citizens, and human beings.
So to really understand these anti-revolutions, these regressive revolts against the discontents of neoliberalism, consider the life of the average American.She livespaycheck to paycheckin alow-wage service job— which leaves her utterly incapable of managing any of life’s exigencies, whether a child, a funeral, a marriage, or an emergency. Hence, life is marked by constant dread and anxiety and panic, not over anything that might come to be — but things thatmustbe, things for which there is no escape, like death, birth, and illness. Simply existing itself is a tax, an ever-growing burden, both economic and psychic for her.
Hope in the future is what eases our fears, but our average American had little, and for good reasons: hisreal income was shrinking, his life expectancy wasdeclining, and worst of all — here is the real point — he feels powerless, helpless, impotent to change his plight in any upwards respect. He is something like a neo-serf, a creation unique in modern history — a nominal citizen of a rich country, but one whose every imaginable possibility went on shrinking (falling life expectancy, remember?).
What would you do if you were in this position? Wouldn’t you want to burn it all down, too?Now, you might raise a moral objection, but the simple fact is this. Burning it all down feels like the only rational response, because at least that way, if you are suffering, then your tormentors will suffer too — and maybe there, in the ruins, where all have fallen, there will be a kind of equality at last. So not only will you have the psychic satisfaction of vengeance, you will also flatten the playing field, on which, for too long, you have merely been a pawn, being kicked this way and that, while the Caesars in their skyboxes laugh, clap, and quaff designer champagne.
Because remember — the winners of neoliberalism, too, are possibly the most thoroughlyundeserving people in modern history. Hedge fund traders earn billions for…doing nothing whatsoever of value, destroying economies wholesale, then flout their takings on gaudy mansions, while retired teachers live in camper vans working for Amazon dot com until the day that they die.Thisis what failed social contracts look like — not just that there are winners and losers, which is inevitable, but that the winners are utter disgraces, colossal human absences of integrity and purpose and beauty and truth, if we are honest, but the losers are, while they might not be saints, something like basically pretty decent people.
Perhaps now you see what I mean when I say: the rational response is “burn it all down” — losing is hard, but bearable, but being preyed upon on by reprehensible, amoral, noxious winners who steal tomorrow’s trophies before they rig today’s game is eminently unbearable, even for a loser.The danger, as always, as it was during the 1930s, is that history, once it begins to be written, is ever harder to unwrite.
And so the question history will ask us this. Why were today’s revolts regressive, not progressive? What went wrong with us turning the wheel of human progress? Why, instead of seeking to leappastneoliberalism, do they seek to leap backward? For that is what they are really doing: Brexit, for example, hopes to make today’s impoverished, powerless neo-serf tomorrow’s little tribal master. Feudalism is the goal of these anti-revolutions, in which the neo-serf becomes a chieftain in his own right, one of the pure in a promised land, and that way, regains a measure the power and privilege he, castrated by neoliberalism, taunted and mocked and demeaned by its thoroughly undeserving winners, lost.
Today’s revolutions are regressive, not progressive, for a very simple reason. What elsewouldthey be? The only choice on offer is backwards versus nowhere, not backwards versus forwards, as it should be. There’s no agenda, plan, idea, movement for how to push the wheel of progress forward — only ones to pull it backwards. Progressive vision, leadership, values, agendas,strong, sweeping, resonant, inspiring, grand — up to the challenge of reaching the millions who have been failed so utterly, not just insta-forgotten nerd-wonkery about tax rate statistics — are totally absent, to a degree that’s jaw-dropping.
The center, left, and sane right do not have an agenda as visionary and sweeping to rebuild everything as the extreme fringe right does towreckeverything.A broad, sweeping, grand plan for how to genuinely rebuild broken societies, economies, polities, cities, towns, and lives. Now, Joe Biden may be the one exception. He’s trying torebuild America’s manufacturing,make it a net exporter, andgive people hope in the futureagain. And thatistranslating into Americans changing as people, for the better,rejecting fascism, and finally moving forward, small steps at a time.
So in America we see both the problem and the solution. You can hardly expect progressive revolutions to catch fire when the spark is missing. The inevitable result is that revolts against failed social contracts and orders can onlybe regressive. But give people hope in the future again, the promise of stability, and regress can be felled.
This is why we live in an age of anti-revolutions. Not counter-revolutions, movements to preserve the status quo.But regressive revolts against a dismally failed way of thinking about the world, one that said, as the many criticisms of neoliberalism go, people are means, not ends, everything is a market, and money is the only denominator of a good life. Even a child knows none of that’s true — only someone as foolish as an intellectual would ever think so.
So these anti-revolutions, these revolts against neoliberalism, are really ways to reclaim the opposite: people are ends, markets are poor ways to organize what matters most in human lives, and the way to measure whether those lives flourish isn’t money, but something else — maybe honor, belonging, blood, in all these ways harkening back to mythologized golden ages where noble kings and knights ruled the land, kneeling in chivalric embraces.
Those who wish to move the world forward, not just backward, must offer it a powerful, sweeping vision, too, in these three key ways: why society exists, what it’s for, and how to organize it.Not just a nostalgic one of a lost past, but of a possible future, that is fairer, wiser, and gentler. Perhaps, in that way, anti-revolution might meet revolution, and in that explosion, a true contest for human possibility might emerge — backwards versus forwards, instead of backwards versus nowhere. If that contest doesn’t, thenthis much is certain: history will repeat itself, as it rewrites itself, again.
