capitalism and freedom. But none of this explains the depth of the disorientation: something in the intellectual Kool-Aid had atrophied our ability to think beyond the present.
Indifference to class, the one-dimensional mindset of the professional ‘Arabists’ and outright self-interest all played a part in misleading the political right. But the left, too, was disoriented. The key problem was spelled out by the theorist Fredric Jameson in 2003: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’7
Twenty years of capitalist realism
When a cheetah catches a gazelle there is always a moment where the prey gives up: it goes floppy, bares its neck, becomes resigned to its fate. You have got me, it seems to say, but now you have to kill me; in the meantime I will try to think about something else.
This has been the relationship between the right and the left since the early 1990s. The organized working class of the Fordist era was smashed, the Soviet Union—if no longer a role model, then at least a pole of opposition to US dominance—was gone. State capitalism and Keynesian economics had been supplanted. Modernism, the beloved republic that had begun with Picasso and Kandinsky, had been overthrown by such geniuses as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Rock and roll was dead several times over; the airwaves now sizzled with litanies to rape and murder by black dudes with diamond earrings. What to do?
If we look at the main intellectual contributions from the left in this period, they are effectively rationalizations of defeat. Jameson’s seminal 1991 account of postmodernism defines it as a ‘condition’, reliant on new technology, a new mass psychology of passivity and the fragmentation of meaning within culture. In this condition, he writes, there is
an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything … What we now begin to feel … is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.8
On top of this there was the media: vast, powerful, impervious to criticism, corporate, and monopolized by the rich. Chomsky and Herman’s celebrated book on the media, Manufacturing Consent, outlined the ways in which control over the media allowed capitalism to assert a new cultural dominance:
The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.9
While that may have been correct when the book was first published, it is striking that the emergence of the Internet did not fundamentally change its authors’ analysis. In their 2002 introduction to a revised edition of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman concluded that the Internet, while a powerful tool for activists, would make no difference to the ability of corporate interests to control the media, or to its essential role as propagandist for big corporations. They judged that the rapid commercialization and concentration of the Internet ‘threatens to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle’.
When it came to philosophy, leftists who had railed against ‘bourgeois ideology’ now abandoned the very concept. Slavoj Žižek rejected the idea that ideology was ‘false consciousness’, arguing, effectively, that ideology is consciousness: it is impossible to escape the mental trap created by capitalism, because one’s life inside the system constantly recreates it. Instead of rebellion we are reduced to perpetual cynicism: we are trapped, like Neo in The Matrix, in a world we know to be half true. But we can’t escape: ‘Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.’10
Add it all up and you get the mindset of the left in an era of defeat. Nothing can change. Dissent is not strong enough to break the media’s stranglehold; only irony or flight are possible.
By the late 1990s, Western mass culture was dominated by this zeitgeist of impotence. Future movie historians will look at the Hollywood catalogue and see this as the dominant theme of the 2000s: from The Matrix and The Truman Show to the Bourne movies, from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to films as various as Avatar and Inception, through all of them there flows the notion of ‘manipulated consciousness’: the suspicion that the hero is trapped within a malevolent system that controls his mind, but which he cannot defeat. This is no longer the external control of Orwell’s 1984, but a pre-programmed alternative reality against which the hero cannot deploy core human values like love and decency.
In an influential essay, cultural commentator Mark Fisher describes the impact of all this on a generation that has known nothing else. He calls the resulting phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’, defined as
the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it … a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining action.11
Up to 2008, the left’s inability to imagine any alternative to capitalism was like a mirror image of the right’s triumphalism. The establishment’s tramline thinking on Islam and its theories of ‘durable authoritarianism’ conformed, like the rest of its ideology, to Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis and the paeans of various commentators—Thomas Friedman foremost among them—to the triumph of globalization. Together, left and right created a shared fatalism about the future.
The right believed that with indomitable power it could create whatever truth it wanted to. In a famous phrase, Karl Rove, senior advisor to then US President George W. Bush, scorned those without power as the ‘reality-based community’. Study reality, if you will, in search of solutions, Rove is said to have told a journalist, but
That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.12
But then Lehman Brothers went bust. Here was a reality the neocons had not created, and against which they were powerless. The date was 15 September 2008. Suddenly, it became possible to imagine the end of capitalism. Indeed, faced with a 50 per cent loss of global stock market value in six months, the scale of the disaster forced even some investors to contemplate it. But few, even now, were prepared to imagine an alternative.
If the rule of men like Mubarak, Gaddafi and Assad had been seen as somehow separate from the rule of free-market capitalism, maybe political science would not have become trapped in the same fatalism as economics. But support for these pro-Western dictators—or more especially for their sons—had always been sold on the basis that they were ‘liberalizers’: freeing up their home market for corporate penetration and, one day soon, reforming their constitutions. This was the theme of the famous essay by Anthony Giddens, which declared Gaddafi to be a follower of the Third Way and Libya on the road to becoming ‘the Norway of North Africa’.13
Consequently, the failure of imagination leaked easily from economics into politics, diplomacy and social affairs. Few could conceive the fall of Mubarak or Gaddafi; the collapse of Rupert Murdoch’s political leverage; the appearance of half a million young demonstrators on the streets of Tel Aviv, or Arab teenagers shouting ‘Fuck Hamas’ in the streets of Gaza City.
In my book Meltdown, in June 2010,1 grappled with the reasons for this deep psychological complacency:
It appears—because it has been the case for twenty years—that every problem is solvable … that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it?14