Conclusion: The Trump Effect
It is no wonder that the authoritarians are winning — they are riding not just one wave, but several. Rapid global change that seems beyond anyone’s control has brought uncertainty and anxiety. Fear warps our decision-making and makes us more accepting of “strong leaders” offering to “protect us” from the dangers out there.
But I am confident that the authoritarians will not deliver. Their resurgence will be short lived.
Already, the “Trump effect” has been a mixed bag. While it initially energized right wing populists world-wide, the Trump administration’s bumbling incompetence seems to have scared voters straight — after their initial euphoria, populists were dealt defeats in the Netherlands and France, and have lost support in the UK and Germany.
(The “Trump effect” has had a different effect on the Arab world — certain Arab regimes who have for decades followed America’s lead now felt like they had Trump in their pocket, and their final masks came off. But that’s another story.)
The right wing populists want to solve intractable problems through exercising and asserting the sovereignty of the state (in their imagination, a “pure” state for a homogeneous people). But this is fantasy. You cannot apply nation-state scale solutions to global-scale problems. The challenges we face — terrorism, migration, the economy, climate change — are intractable precisely because they are global in nature, and hence beyond the ability of any individual “sovereign” state to fix. Neither can you “unmix” our societies after generations of immigration and intermixing. That imaginary “pure” nation-state to which they want to return is gone forever.
They seem to be standing within a broken paradigm, promising to rebuild it. But it is long shattered. If we are to borrow from Thomas Kuhn on the subject of paradigms, then the breakage of one only predicts the rise of a better one.
Our world today is riddled with broken paradigms — of which the trends we described above are only a reflection. But we cannot go forward by going backward. You cannot undo globalization, you can only improve it.
We happen to be stuck in the limbo between the breakage of an old paradigm and the rise of a new one. We aren’t witnessing the return of the paradigm championed by right wing populists — we are witnessing its death. In the words of Antonio Gramsci, “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters”. And monsters do not die quietly.
Epilogue
It’s my turn at the passport control counter. I step forward and present my passport. I fumble a bit — passport controls always give me anxiety, not least because I spent 26 days stranded in this very airport back in 2014, following my extrajudicial expulsion from my former country. My statelessness makes me fall between the cracks of this world order, and this perhaps helps me see what others take for granted.
The next message I receive is from Maryam Nayeb Yazdi, a Canadian-Iranian human rights activist. “Trump is good for human rights”, she says. “Just like Ahmadinejad was good for human rights”.
I immediately understood what she meant. There’s mercy when an ugly system has a loudmouthed, abrasive, ugly face to it. Trump’s victory is a rallying cry for the defenders of liberal democracy and human rights across the world. Trump has jolted many out of complacency, to a dogged determination to fight for open societies.
As fate would have it, for the next few years, we will be working on countering radicalization and illiberal authoritarianism in a global atmosphere in which they are empowered. We will be working on popularizing democracy, human rights, and open society values in a world in which they are imperiled. Trump’s rise, in a way, validates our worldview — illiberalism is rising worldwide for lack of more of our kind of work. A Trump presidency increases the demand for our work, the market size for our ideas, and their urgency and relevance.
Trump’s win was alarming, but it is also energizing. The threat is more real and imminent than ever, but I can see the silver lining.
As I’m writing these lines, Ahmed sends me a brief message with a link. “I’m keeping a running list of paradigmatic problems”. A “paradigmatic problem” is how, in our conversations, we refer to stubborn, seemingly intractable problems that defy solution because those trying to solve them are proceeding from the very same paradigm that produced them — like trying to push a box whilst sitting inside it.
Perhaps it’s time for this tiny team of Islamic libertarians to contribute to the defense of liberty, not only in the Muslim world, but worldwide.
Menu:
Introduction
#1 The Triumph of Globalization
#2 The Loss of Anchors
#3 Economic Transformation
#4 Obsolete Nationalism
#5 Political Failure
#6 Social Media Broke our Public Sphere
#7 The Unravelling of the Middle-East (Previous Section)
Conclusion: The Trump Effect (You are here)
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