Tapestries-66 | Currents

Where we are, and where we're headed, politically.

Photo by davide ragusa

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In 2024, over 4 billion people will vote in elections across more than 40 countries, including the US election in November. As we cycle through a politically charged, culturally fractured and geopolitically volatile year, many people seem to be asking themselves—with a mixture of disorientation and fear—what’s going on? Where are we, and where do we go from here?

I obviously don’t have an answer to these questions, partly because they’re unanswerable, and partly because they converge at the intersection of fields in which I have no expertise. But I’m pretty sure you read Tapestry less for answers, and more for joint exploration. So as we live through the tumult, this is my attempt at trying to get my bearings.

In this piece, we’ll cover three questions. First, where have we come from? Second, how should we understand the current moment? And third, where do we go from here? My contention is that we’re living through a crisis of authority, and struggle for power, and that we need to update our frameworks to more accurately describe where we’re going, which looks like a relatively uncertain future. Let’s discuss why.

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#1 Where have we come from?

If our aim is to get our bearings, in the hope of having a better sense of where we’re going, we need to tell a short story about how we got to where we are today. I think the story should start in 2008, because my contention is that our current political struggles are rooted in popular discontent and institutional decay, which are trends we can see emerge from the Global Financial Crisis.

The seeds of popular discontent…

After the global financial system almost collapsed in 2008 as a result of financial speculation and criminal wrongdoing, the perpetrators and their institutions got bailed out, while the working class got ruined and foreclosed, in what’s often referred to as the “privatization of profit and socialization of loss”. Over the next decade in the West, we lived through stagnation for the working class, soaring asset prices for elites, cultural changes driven by social movements and identity politics, and structural changes driven by globalization and immigration. Trump’s election was the next pivotal moment in this story, as it can be viewed as a revolt against, and repudiation of, the elitist culture that many perceived was behind the events and changes described above. While the preceding story is focused on the US, it feels broadly true elsewhere in the world, where populist movements—partially based on the belief that institutions are ineffective, corrupt, and self-serving—remain as strong as ever.

Trump’s presidency was dominated by two things. The first was his abrasiveness, breaking of norms, and alleged criminal wrongdoing. And the second was the broad institutional attempts to delegitimize his presidency. Trump was (and still is) considered either the embodiment of evil that had to be defeated by any means necessary, or a martyr fighting the corrupt establishment and deep state. His presidency and our story were therefore defined by intense anger and polarization from 2016 onwards. We then began 2020 with the advent of Covid-19, and the social upheaval associated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Covid-19 and BLM were accelerants and critical moments in our story about popular discontent, because they demonstrated institutions’ desire and capacity to control what we think. Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory has many great frameworks for understanding the world, and one of them is that we are living in a “Fiat World,” which is one where we are told what to believe, and where we live in a reality defined by the declarations of those in power, instead of our lived experiences. Here are some examples.

In the last few years, we were told it was racist to suggest Covid-19 originated in a lab. We were told there was no way a vaccine could be safely developed and rolled out in a short timeframe, to then be told we could be excluded from parts of society if we didn’t take said vaccine. We were told that white supremacy pervaded our culture, that it wasn’t enough to not be racist, that to suggest any different was simply a sign of our white fragility, and that corporations and universities must embrace these truths. After Covid-19, we were told that inflation was transitory, and when prices settled 20% higher than where they were, we were told that inflation was almost “back under control”. In the lead up to the US election, we’re being told that candidates with clear cognitive decline are sharp enough to lead the free world. And finally, and perhaps most brazenly, we’ve been told through this period that sex is not biologically determined, and that to suggest otherwise is transphobic.

There are well-intentioned and non-sinister reasons behind many of the assertions above. My point therefore is less about litigating each example, and more about describing their impact in totality over the last decade+, which in our story…

…Lead to institutional decay

For many people, the last few years have been dominated by being told that they need to believe things that contradict their lived experiences, embodying Ben’s concept of a Fiat World. And when the things they’re told turn out to be innocently untrue or deliberately false, it erodes trust in institutions, namely: governments, financial systems, media and other organizations we have traditionally vested with the authority and power to mediate and manage our realities.

To quote Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public, this dynamic has created a “painfully visible gap between the institutions' claims of competence and their actual performance”, which has led to a crisis of authority that defines our current moment. From there, the loss of trust evolved into outright contempt when portions of the public perceived tightly-bound coordination between government, media, big tech, finance and law enforcement that allows them to “criminalize, de-bank, and de-platform any citizen at will, without any pretense of due process.” While this may read as conspiratorial, that’s not my intent. I am simply trying to articulate a story about the past that’s capable of helping us understand the nature of the current moment. Similarly, I am not seeking to apportion blame for the current state of affairs on one side over the other, because that would be unfair, and would also distract from the deeper conflict we’re living through.

As institutions decline in standing and authority, we are left with a cultural and political power vacuum of sorts, and it’s one that today’s movements are seeking to fill. To quote Gurri again, “Ideological differences have powerful consequences, and I don't intend to downplay them. I only observe that ideology, left and right, must now accommodate itself to the deeper struggle—to the crisis of authority”. With the story about how we got here in mind, let’s keep pulling on this thread.

#2 How should we understand the current moment?

We first need to update our conceptual frameworks

One of the challenges with getting our bearings is that we don’t have the right vocabulary to talk about the competing ideas and sides we are surrounded by. Our political and cultural conversations remain rooted in the left-right paradigm, with the “far” left or right used to denote the more extreme members of each camp. I think these descriptors remain important and useful, but cannot be relied upon as the sole framework to describe the realities driving political and cultural change within the context of the crisis of authority described above. We therefore need supplemental frameworks to understand where we are, and I offer some here (emphasis in the below is mine).

Gurri (referenced above) partially attributes our crisis of authority to the evolution of the information landscape. As such, he refers to to our time as a “tug of war [that] pits hierarchy against network, power against persuasion, government against the governed”. Michael Lind, in The New Class War, approaches the same struggle for power from the perspective of class and economics, stating that today’s conflict “consists of struggles in particular Western nations among local overclasses and local working classes.” And Yascha Mounk, who approaches the question from a more traditional European political lens, recently stated that “[o]ver the past decade, the rise of populist movements has added a second political cleavage to the politics of the continent: The distinction between insurgents and the establishment is now as important as that between left and right.”

Politics used to be about choosing a leader, a platform, and a set of policies and ideas. But today, political movements and elections are framed as struggles to save ourselves from tyranny. The key insight of the alternate framings above is that political struggles today are as much about power—and pitting power centres against each other—as they are about competing ideas. Today, it’s not just that opponents are proposing policies we disagree with, but that should our opponents prevail, they will take us down paths that lead to totalitarianism, depravity, economic ruin, and ecological destruction.

Ideological incoherence is an important tell

We see this struggle for power in the apparent ideological incoherence of some of today’s political or social movements. Some movements are making clear political calculations that permit the trading of some of their values in return for a more powerful platform, as they see power within their reach, as trust in institutions declines and our political landscape becomes increasingly fractured.

Here are two slogans that provide useful examples. “Queers for Palestine” and “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my President” don’t make sense when viewed through traditional ideological lenses. The LGBTQ community in Gaza and the West Bank faces “an extraordinary level of persecution”, and Trump could be described as someone who embodies the opposite of traditional Christian values. But they’re only incoherent if our frameworks only cover ideology, and not power. Intersectionality (on the “left”) posits that our society is built on interconnected systems of oppression, and Christian nationalism (on the “right”) posits that a country’s national identity and laws should embody its original Christian values.

These are clearly ideological movements of the left and right, but they’re willingness to support people and ideas that obviously contradict their values is borne of a political calculation, namely their belief that their platforms have a clear path to power within a chaotic cultural and political landscape. On the left, it’s through institutional capture and dominating a rudderless Democratic Party, and on the right, it’s through hitching their wagon to the unstable Republican Party and its frontrunning Presidential candidate (who’s only too willing to accommodate them in his own bald-faced pursuit of power). This would not be the first example in history of political opportunism. And I don’t mean to suggest that the ideologies of “left” and “right” are no longer relevant. Clearly, they are. But my point is now that they are either subservient to, equal with, the pursuit of power.

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It’s worth taking a breath at this point before we continue into the last section. To refresh, the first section tried to articulate the nature of popular discontent and institutional decay, and where they came from, and this second section tried to articulate that nature of our movements and what they’re struggling for within the context of the crisis of authority. Understanding both are critical to understanding where we may be headed, because the nature of our political moment must be viewed within the context of recent history. And with that, hopefully we can move into this final section with some added clarity that may help us think through the future.

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#3 Where are we headed?

First, what’s “at stake” in our politics will continue to be framed in dire terms, leading to a range of increasingly concerning behaviors. Our political and cultural movements will increasingly embody a religious fervor, as people are led to believe that what’s at stake in their political battles is nothing short the future of democracy and/or the planet. We are also entrenching a politics and culture largely framed in the negative. Today, ideas and platforms are often framed in reference to what they are not, or what they are fighting against. Populism itself is based on exploiting fear and resentment of change, with many other movements described as “anti-” this or that. There is a nihilism implicit in more extreme movements that’s hard to unsee, which may in time be mirrored with a growing ambivalence from centrists as their platforms and candidates increasingly cater to the extremes. With the stakes framed as they are, increasingly brazen exercises of coercive power, like excessive lawfare and political trials, may become a common feature of the political landscape in a dangerous escalation of political antagonism and norm breaking.

Second, I don’t think populism is going anywhere. In the US, the populist agenda that Trump will likely push into the election will be based around the economic struggles of the working class, and the volume of uncontrolled immigration in the country’s south. Without making comment on its merits or substance, I believe it’s a very compelling election platform. The popular discontent at the root of his first Presidency remains as robust as ever, and the last 4 years have done little to rebuild trust in institutions or the establishment. Results in Europe and the UK make it clear that domestic populations—both native-born and immigrant—are placing immigration at-or-near the top of the ballot, which bodes well for populists, and poorly for incumbents. Over the last decade, many people had hoped that we’ve been living through a brief populist moment. I think it’s clear that’s no longer the case, and populism seems here to stay.

Third, the conditions are ripe for the Great Man/Woman Theory, or the rise of a new mass movement. This piece has sought to describe the crisis of authority that sits at the core of our current political moment. The frameworks described earlier (hierarchy/network, insurgent/establishment) also need to be viewed alongside individual experiences that are increasingly defined by loneliness, frustration and boredom. Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, states:

“There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui… When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom.”

In many ways I think this describes the texture of existence for many people today. Our crisis of authority, loss of faith in institutions, and increasingly atomized existence create the conditions for the rise of mass movements, and the emergence of dominant leaders, whether benevolent, demagogic, religious or nationalist (perhaps a topic for another piece). Trump’s success is partially a function of this dynamic, and I would not be surprised to see other people or movements rise to take advantage of the swirling turbulence.

Bringing it together

This piece is relatively dense, and covers quite a bit of ground, so I want to end with something simple. My objective here hasn’t necessarily been to convince you that our institutions are corrupt, self-serving, or ineffective. My objective has been to hopefully show you why it’s a rational thing for many people to believe. We have lived through a relatively dizzying period of economic, technological and cultural change. If you have not been a beneficiary of the exponential “progress” along each of these curves, then the change may understandably leave you disillusioned, and contemptuous of the power centers behind the change (or stagnation). That may be difficult for certain people reading this to internalize, but I believe it’s a key starting point if one wants to understand where we are.

Looking to history as a guide, I have seen several people persuasively draw parallels between today, and the Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the deeper one goes the more parallels one finds. One of the similarities we’ve touched on in this piece is the breakdown in trust in our institutions. In the Reformation, it was a breakdown in trust in the ultimate power structure of the time, the Catholic church (amongst others), and as we’ve discussed above, we are living through a breakdown in trust in elite institutions today. Another is the turbulence created by new information technologies, which was the printing press then, and today has been social media and the advent of AI. And finally, it’s the sense that “every inch of political space is contested” (per Gurri) in a fight over the ideas and structures that will define our future. There was no “winner” in the Reformation. There was just a different reality on the other side, and that’s where I think we’re headed: persistent turbulence and unknown change, and a reorganization of our power structures.

Writing this piece was hard because it feels unsatisfying not to pull on all the different threads it raises, or to run certain ideas to ground. But that’s probably enough for now. As we move through the year, elections across the world will give us insight and data around some of what we’ve discussed above. Our job is to watch and listen, and plan and adapt accordingly. See you next time.