30 Years From The Wall's Fall and 3 Years From Trump's Rise

Happier days

This morning one of those Facebook memories reminded me that it's been three years since November 9, 2016. (They rarely remind me of happy things.) The 8th was election day, but the 9th was the day that the reality of what had happened set in. A little while later I realized that today is also the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In Germany this day is called "Schicksalstag" (Day of Fate) because it was on November 9, 1918, that a revolution toppled the Kaiser and on November 9, 1938, that the Nazis perpetuated the pogroms of the Night of Broken Glass. It is a reminder of the unpredictable careening of history and its utter lack of permanence. In that light it's appropriate that we think of Trump's rise and the Wall's fall on the same day.

The Soviet bloc's demise inspired Francis Fukuyama's now infamous theory about the "end of history" (which must be said was much disputed even at the time.) With Leninism in the grave there was supposedly no other game in town other than liberal capitalist democracy.

The Islamic revolution ten years before in Iran ought to have been a clue of how limited such a thesis was, but I digress.

Pretty immediately after the fall of the Wall it was apparent that nationalism was stepping back into the political vacuum. Czechoslovakia broke up in the Velvet Divorce, Yugoslavia broke up in a civil war that included genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. Right wing violence against immigrants spiked in Germany, and Le Pen came in second place in the French presidential election of 2002. Events like 9/11 put nationalism off the radar of international observers, however. It was still gaining strength, of course. The new Putin regime, founded at the start of the new century, showed the effectiveness of a marriage between authoritarianism and nationalism, especially in countries with new democracies. After the economic collapse of 2008, a bunch of other nations started down this road. From Poland to Hungary to India to China an anti-democratic, anti-pluralist populist nationalism is the globe's most disruptive political force. It's hardly a mistake that Russia is the world's foremost exporter of nationalist authoritarianism. It pioneered this political form and is a nation run by former intelligence operatives who understand the importance of misinformation and soft power.

History is made up of trends and events, and while the trends are like tides, events have much more contingency attached to them. The fall of the Wall was haphazard and unexpected because the East German official who announced the opening of the border to the West did not reckon that crowds of East Germans would flood the Wall. If he had known that, he would have been more clear and the scenes that are so famous likely would not have happened. The same goes for the election of Donald Trump. The man himself was not expecting to get elected! He lost by three million votes, but the Electoral College, James Comey, Wikileaks, a tepid HRC campaign, and other factors helped put him into power.

He was in a position to benefit from these accidents because the Fall of the Wall did not bring about an end to history. Instead, it brought complacency. Even if you didn't buy into Fukuyama, it was still very tempting to see democracy in America at least as permanent. Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War did not bring a peace dividend for America. Soon enough there would be more war. In 1989 public discourse was alarmed at social inequality, that problem only got worse and worse. In the moment of triumph any real attempt at self-reflection was completely avoided. At around the same time, conservatives decided to embark on a scorched earth political agenda.

Now we find ourselves in a situation where an authoritarian nationalist rules America. He puts immigrant children in camps. He bans Muslims from entering the country. He fills the courts with reactionaries who despise reproductive and civil rights. In many states Republicans are limiting the vote, preventing Democratic governors from ruling, and challenging the results of legitimate elections.

The Cold War is over, but both sides lost. The Soviet Union's defeat was made manifest on November 9, 1989, America's on November 9, 2016. The movement of history's tides today is clear, but we need to swim against the current one even if it exhausts us. The post-1989 complacency cannot be repeated if democracy is going to live.

Commercials From Hell: Gorbachev Sells Pizza Hut

When I taught world history to college students, I would end my class about the end of the Cold War by showing this commercial. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was reduced to shilling for a second-rate fast food pizza company. Is there anything that better sums up the victory of capitalism? Of for that matter, the utterly fatuous nature of the brand of capitalism that triumphed?

One of my favorite passages from The Communist Manifesto deals with how capitalism destroys traditional culture.

"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers."

Whatever Marx got wrong, he certainly got that right. Gorbachev turned into pizza pitchman was ultimate proof of capitalism's ability to force every single aspect of modern life to bend to its values system. Back in the 1990s it was easy to think that this was the end of history. How wrong that was.

Reading Le Carre in the Age of Trump

Behold 1970s London, in all its grimy, depressing glory

After dabbling with the works of John Le Carre over the years, I recently got completely hooked on him. I am currently on Smiley's People, my fourth Le Carre novel since March with no signs of slowing down.

As much as I love Le Carre's writing by itself, I think the current moment has made his work a big draw for me. This might seem paradoxical, since I've been reading his Cold War novels, which appear to describe a political world completely foreign to our own. This is especially the case with his "Karla Trilogy" of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People. They were written in the 1970s, when the Cold War's intensity waned and the prestige of spying had worn off. The spies in these novels continue to play a deadly game that most people have stopped caring to watch. This gray 1970s world seems so unlike our own overheated, garish Trumpian fantasia.

Le Carre's main thesis in the Smiley novels is the futility of the Cold War spy game. The agencies are lost in a maze of mirrors, unable to see clearly through the haze of paranoia and confusion. While he has an obvious dislike of the Soviet Union, Le Carre shows the West doing terrible things to try to win the game. In the process it diminishes the ideals that it is supposedly fighting to protect. This all seems especially futile in the 1970s, after three decades of fighting a conflict with no end in sight. While I am much more convinced of the justice of the cause of stopping the global wave of nationalism than Smiley may have been of his own, I am feeling a similar futility. I do not think the war will be won. It won't necessarily be lost either. I see stretched out before me decades of conflict and costly yet ineffectual struggle.

Another feature of Le Carre's books is how Smiley and other agents must constantly deal with the fatuous nature of politicians and higher-ups within the agency. The leaders of the system they are defending are lame and uninspiring. I've been thinking about this a lot in regards to the current political situation. I have stayed engage despite, rather than because, of the political leaders of the Democratic party. Trump keeps discovering new ways to abuse his power, but Pelosi and others keep ruling out impeachment, the exact legal remedy for these situations. They have become so comfortable in their power that they don't want to have to actually take a risk. In this regard they remind me of Oliver Lacon, a recurring Le Carre character. He's a product of the upper class and a civilian overseer of the secret service. Lacon is typically concerned with what can't be done, as opposed to what can be done. He's not all that desperate to get things done because deep down, he knows that he will be okay.

Back in November of 2016 I was depressed. In 2017 and 2018 I was extremely politically active, but now it seems that so many people who pledged to resist the current regime have just gone home. It's hard to participate in protest and political agitation by myself, which is basically the current situation. Like George Smiley, I can't give up a fight that may ultimately be futile. It's a strange thing to commit oneself to, and I am glad I have John Le Carre novels to help me along.

1983 On My Mind

"Seconds" is one of U2's best obscure songs, about the very real fear of nuclear war in 1983

When people these days recall the year 1983 their main associations are probably kitschy nostalgia for things like "Come On Eileen" and Cabbage Patch Kids. In reality, they ought to recall that year with sheer terror.

1983 may well have been the closest the world came to nuclear war during the Cold War, closer than maybe even the Cuban Missile Crisis. At least that crisis had roots in an actual conflict, the nuclear war that almost came in '83 was the result of rhetoric and shadow-boxing. Ronald Reagan's aggressive posture towards the Soviet Union, the "Star Wars" missile defense program, as well as his "evil empire" rhetoric prompted Soviet leaders to suspect that Reagan was willing to launch a preemptive strike.

Reagan's rhetoric was a big show, of course, but he didn't know that the Soviets didn't know that. Events that year exacerbated the tensions, such as the attack on US marines in Beirut, the US invasion of Grenada, the Soviet shooting down of a South Korean airliner, and NATO military exercises codenamed "Able Archer" that the Soviets interpreted as cover for preparing an attack. The West did not know that at that moment the button could well have been pushed, all over a misinterpretation of events by the Soviets that America was unknowingly contributing to. In the autumn of 1983 this possibility finally got through to Reagan. A KGB double agent cultivated by British intelligence let the US and UK know about just how paranoid Andropov and the Soviet leadership had become. Furthermore, Reagan watched the TV movie The Day After, which scared the shit out of 8 year old me and millions of others. The former Hollywood actor, so prone to living in a fantasy world of signs and symbols, finally seemed to understand the stakes of his recklessness.

I've been thinking a lot about this moment because I feel that the world today is similarly dangling above an abyss. Since 9/11 Americans have conditioned themselves to fear terror attacks, but I am more concerned by what having an unstable, brain-addled amoral black hole in charge of America's military and foreign policy means for us. I get the feeling from what we keep hearing from people who have left the Trump administration that his aides have held him back from even worse and more destructive acts than he has already committed.

In 1983 the world hung in the balance as president with his head in the clouds behaved recklessly and the paranoid secret police operative on the other side wildly overreacted. At the end of the day Reagan and Andropov were both irresponsible, but also capable of seeing their mistakes. Trump is a man with zero capacity for self-reflection. His aides are departing him, and he is backed into a corner.

One of the scariest things about the state of the world in 1983 is that so much of it was kept from the public. Very very few people knew in November of that year that the Able Archer exercises brought the world close to annihilation. While I was on the playground at recess in the second grade the mushroom clouds could very well have come. Every day I wonder about plots that are hatched out of public view, and the paranoid fantasies much more likely to be brought to fruition by a man with zero sense of restraint. As the song at the top says, it takes only seconds to say goodbye.