by Del Cap Fri Oct 18, 2024 11:58 pm
NYRB
November 7, 2024
The Flailing Superpower
Pankaj Mishra
The spectacle of America on the global stage
For decades now the prolonged theater of US presidential elections has attracted a global audience keen to be educated in the arcana of the electoral college and the psephology of the “swing” states. These millions of spectators have been markedly partisan, wistfully hoping for victory to the Democratic candidate and a foreign policy that at least acknowledges the decent opinions of mankind before proceeding to disregard them.
In the early 2000s official mendacity about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, boosted by a compliant American media, created a vast global reservoir of cynicism about democratic American institutions and propelled the United States itself into the post-truth age. The election of the first Black man as US president, after the catastrophic years of the “war on terror” and the financial crisis, briefly sparked hopes of a broad correction. Barack Obama, who had opposed the Iraq War, quickly became the “biggest celebrity in the world” (in the deprecating words of his hapless rival John McCain), and his elevation to the White House, accompanied by slogans of hope and change and partly enabled by the politicization of young Americans, seemed an opportunity to bring fresh energy and imagination to US politics and culture.
As it happened, Obama, safeguarding Wall Street and polishing his personal brand, bequeathed to the United States and the world a volatile demagogue. Some relief was inspired by Joe Biden’s narrow win in 2020 and his early economic reconfigurations, but it could not survive his posture abroad, which was in crucial respects—confronting China, securing a “deal” between Israel and Saudi Arabia—a continuation of Trump’s. Events in the last year have now conclusively ended US elections’ emotional and moral sway over the world.
A poll cited recently in Foreign Affairs reveals cratering support for the US and an increased preference for China among prominent Asian countries as partner. But statistics alone won’t register the depth and scale of the suspicion built over more than two decades—that, by intensifying misbegotten foreign entanglements in the midst of economic decline, the United States has damaged its own institutions and social fabric, in addition to undermining international law and squandering its prestige and authority. Further, a change of occupants in the White House is no longer sufficient even to temporize against the dark and uncontrollable forces unleashed by the world’s most powerful society in severe polycrisis.
The most recent embodiment of a hectically flailing superpower for many outside the US is a Democratic president addicted to arming Israel, a reckless American protégé that pursues total war—the deliberate targeting of civilian lives and infrastructure as well as military enemies—on multiple fronts. Any great power, let alone a self-proclaimed upholder of a “rules-based liberal international order,” that cannot hold disorder within limits quickly loses legitimacy, and the implications for both American interests and image even in the present are stark.
But Israel, combining industrialized mass killing with cultural devastation, is bringing forth, with some help from Russia, another wounded nationalism seeking permanent security, a new “age of extremes.” As in the twentieth century’s seminal calamity, World War I, an extensive moral and legal arson is quickening decisive steps toward authoritarianism in several Western societies. Politicians and businessmen across the ideological spectrum openly violate long-established norms and protocols of public life, from a Tory home secretary in Britain egging on far-right mobs and the owner of X promoting the Great Replacement theory to Germany’s foreign minister, of the progressive Green Party, claiming to have seen a video of a Hamas militant raping an Israeli woman (no such video is known to exist).
That Biden, an old-machine politician who has received more money from Israel lobby groups than anyone in Congress since 1990, should fail to perceive the insidious dynamic of nihilism is no great surprise. Those who noticed him bear-hugging Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, in his attempt to globally mobilize democracy against autocracy, had already written him off as a walking ideological delusion from the cold war who is unable to spot the world’s new constellation of forces (which make, among other things, “democratic” India underwrite autocratic Russia’s war on Ukraine). Compulsively provisioning Israel’s massacres while chanting “cease-fire” over several months, Biden and his secretary of state confirm the widespread feeling that, as the famous internal memo to Robert S. McNamara in 1967 put it, “‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind.”
What’s more unsettling (and clarifying) to a global audience is that mainstream journalistic cultures in the US offer no intelligent restraint on the collective lurch, under a Democratic president, toward modern history’s best-signposted abyss. News outlets covering Israel’s “self-defense” continue to amplify, even after a calamitous year, the delusions and fabrications of the White House and the State Department, in a grim repeat of the intellectual and moral fiascos of the “war on terror.” Deliberately turning away from US-assisted carnage abroad, many liberal intellectual elites stress the urgency of mobilizing against Trump’s plan to extirpate democracy at home. But recoiling from Trump’s frankly malevolent fantasies, they keep collapsing into fresh illusions.
No other conclusion could be drawn by foreign observers as they witnessed an extraordinary recent spectacle: liberal American commentators vying with one another to hail Biden, visibly insentient and driven into retirement by ruthless party apparatchiks and donors, for his “sacrifice,” and to confect “joy” over Harris, an instantly forgettable presidential candidate in 2020 and subsequently confirmed during her tenure as vice-president as a political vacancy.
The global romance with Western political leaders of non-Western ancestry has already soured. Obama heralded a “post-racial” age, but after the demagogic flourishes of Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and Vivek Ramaswamy, politicians of diverse origins incite fear of a sinister regression rather than hope for social justice. Scribbling the words “FINISH THEM!” on an Israeli artillery shell bound for Lebanon, Nikki Haley, the second Indian American to compete for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, helped outline what a “brown Nazi” might look like in the future. Whether crowing about her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a torchbearer for torture; promising to shoot intruders in her home; or vowing to make the US military “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” the first Indian American presidential candidate from the Democratic Party shows few signs of defying the steadily dominant far-right ideals of violent hypermasculinity.
At the same time, Biden’s last-minute replacement seems miserably unequal, as she hides from her own courtiers in the media, to the unprecedented demands arising from the threats of far-right tyranny in the US. And hardly any resources for a renewal seem to exist among an aging liberal American political and media class. Its global prominence, as is clear now, was earned with raw power, during decades of unimpeded American hegemony, rather than superior intelligence and creativity. Not even the challenge of China, long predicted and now formidable, compels policy- and opinion-makers to shake off complacency and articulate a novel political and cultural vision.
Desperate to avoid a second and potentially lethal Trump presidency, they frantically generate, for the second time in four years, some new fantasies of salvation. But the savior they offered in 2020, a candidate even then showing clear signs of decrepitude, has revealed himself before a stunned global audience to be an obsessive enabler of a mass murder spree across the Middle East. Having confirmed that there is no such thing as a lesser evil, the US presidential elections won’t ever command the sentimental hopes of the world. Just as well: skepticism and stoicism would be better shields against the coming disorder.
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