Last week marked the 28th anniversary of the failed 1991 hardline communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. In Russia, where tens of thousands have been marching for free and fair elections and where thousands have been brutally beaten and detained by the police, it was an occasion for melancholy reflections. People reminisced nostalgically about those heady days and the miraculous short respite in their country’s ugly history of oppression that followed.
For the rest of the world, it was a symbolic moment when the communist ideology finally died. Begun as a clarion call for liberation and prosperity in 1848, Soviet-style communism perpetrated unspeakable crimes against humanity wherever it was victorious, murdering, enslaving, impoverishing and depraving millions. Dancing on its grave, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history and the death of ideology.
Fukuyama’s idea was by turns praised as groundbreaking and ridiculed as utter nonsense. Indeed, he was both right and wrong. Grand political ideologies are no more, but they have been broken down into tiny sound-bite ideologies that are every bit as pernicious as those grand ideologies.
When ideologies ruled the world, their top adherents presented themselves as great social thinkers. They used up tons of paper presenting and rationalizing their worldview. Published in the USSR, the collected works of Marx and Engels ran to 50 volumes, those of Lenin to 55 volumes and those of Stalin to 18 volumes. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, much-ridiculed before he came to power for its grotesque German and harebrained ideas, ran to 720 pages.
In many ways, Donald Trump is a genius politician. He understood two things. First, that old ideology–a set of ironclad principles and ideas held by people in the 20th century–have become a dead weight in the 21st century. The day before his victory in November 2016, his Republican Party believed in fiscal discipline, free trade, legal immigration, market forces, the Western alliance, protection and spread of democracy and human rights around the world and family values. Trump single-handedly shook them free of those beliefs in about two weeks.
Second, Trump saw that the so-called masses were receptive to a series of sound-bite postulates, each at most 140 characters long, which was the maximum allowed length of a tweet. He invented a Twitter ideology that is very simple and basic: it’s Us against Them. Trump is promulgating this ideology every day, and quite often at night. Having gathered around him some one-third of America’s population who proved receptive to this kind of ideology, he tweets day in and day out about a world in which Us are attacked by various enemies–Them. It’s the principle that is important, not the content. Yesterday’s cherished member of Us can tomorrow become the vilest of them, and a principle that was held dear yesterday may be junked and viciously slammed tomorrow.
Other world leaders are yet to adopt Twitter to run their countries. But the hollowing out of grand ideology and its replacement with half-wit Us vs. Them soundbites is evident almost everywhere.
This transformation has taken the three decades since the end of the Cold War. Former communist powers, Russia and China, where the first to dump ideology. To be sure, China managed to free itself of the ideological baggage without changing anything in the structure of its communist state. It’s as if the Vatican were to stop believing in god but left the structure of the Catholic Church and all of its rituals intact.
States that were built on ideologies strove for support among their population. All too often it was a pack of lies, but both communists and fascists wanted their ideas to be shared by their people. The Us vs. Them vision, on the contrary, vitally needs Them in order to exist. They share a group identity, but it can be as fluid as the head ideologue, a Trump or a Putin, want it to be.
Thus, the Chinese who attack Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters claim they are “nationalists”; they support the imposition of repressive laws on a tiny beachhead of freedom in China by the parasitic, corrupt communist bureaucracy on the mainland. They are clearly oblivious of the fact that it used to be Taiwan’s anti-communist Kuomintang who were called the nationalist Chinese.
Russia is even more fluid in it “nationalist” and “Orthodox” ideology. Muslim Chechens, who two decades ago were vilified as “little animals” are now an integral part of the Russian identity, while Orthodox Georgians and, more to the point, Ukrainians, are now suddenly the worst of enemies.
Trump-style Twitter ideology, albeit without the use of Twitter, is triumphantly marching around the once-enlightened Western world, too. Brexit has transmogrified from dogged defence of British sovereignty to a process that risks breaking up the United Kingdom, from keeping all the money at home to a realistic prospect of pauperization and from an appeal for freedom to abject subjugation to Trump.
In Italy you have Matteo Salvini, a wannabe Duce who instead of an ideology offers his groupies his pot belly to rub.
And then there is Ukraine which with the election of Zelensky has turned away from nationalism and is heading for some sort of a tragicomic muddle. Worse, signs of Us vs. Them preoccupations by the new administration in Kyiv are starting to pop up. They are now directed at members of the Poroshenko government and may, perhaps, embrace a broader array of domestic opponents.
Ironically, while the 2013-14 revolution in Ukraine and protests in Hong Kong had clearly defined goals, many other protest movements are becoming hollowed out and empty of ideological content. Occupy Wall Street in the US and Gilets Jaunes in France come to mind. While coming from the left (although it is an open question in the case of French riots), they also have an Us vs. Them principle at their core.
As to governments–to Trump, Putin, Xi and their ilk in the UK, Italy, Hungary, Brazil and a growing number of other countries–what do they actually want to achieve by sicking one portion of their population on the other? The obvious answer is money.
The policies of major central banks over the past three decades have been to pump an increasing stream of liquidity into the world financial system. The money has been debased but the world’s super-rich appear to have become fixated on grabbing more and more of it. The world’s non-ideological authoritarians have joined the ranks of the global super-rich. They and their immediate circle of backers seem obsessed with using power to acquire more money and then to use power to protect their wealth.
Trump and Putin don’t always see eye to eye: the US has been bolstering NATO’s eastern defenses, providing some help to Ukraine and urging its Western allies to reduce their dependence on Russian natural gas. But underneath these policy disagreements, Trump and Putin are twins. Or Dioscuri, since both have been increasingly convinced of their divine mission. Not surprisingly, Trump has been talking about readmitting Russia to the Group of Seven leading industrial nations.
Trump and Xi have escalated their misbegotten trade war, but once again the fundamentals of their relationship are sound–as Trump never tires of repeating.
Thus, what we’re witnessing here are the birth pangs of a new, dangerous Axis of Evil. If it comes about, it will encompass the world’s largest economies and the most powerful militaries; it will be hard for the rest of the world to oppose this unholy alliance.
