A Reeling Left Must Face the Great Divide

“Parties do not lead revolutions. They follow them. And then only when forced to.” — Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

After Donald Trump’s mighty and seismic re-election, Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest dude, posted a cryptic message on his social media platform X.

The mystical meme accelerated via another Musk platform, Starlink, or what my neighbour calls “Starlord.” It then percolated through a network of more than 7,000 satellites now crowding out the sky’s constellations, before it dropped onto my screen, like magic, in the Porcupine Hills of southern Alberta.

It read: “Novus Ordo Seclorum.”

That’s Latin for: “A new order of the ages is born.”

Musk, of course, exudes more hubris than a nude Roman statue, but make no mistake about it. The Trump revolution will rearrange the United States in highly disruptive ways.

Here’s a brief summary of the incendiary situation, and not even the satirist Kurt Vonnegut could imagine such an extraordinary fandango:

A group of techno oligarchs (Musk and company) have endorsed a postmodernist president that fellates microphones and praises missions to Mars. His committed supporters include ultra-nationalist and Christian revolutionary cadres that admire the tyrant Vladimir Putin. Many of these revolutionaries view Putin as the man who will save civilization from western decadence. They call themselves traditionalists and avatars of post-liberalism. They want to restore the spiritual life and energy of a nation wounded by globalism and degenerate liberalism.

The revolutionaries propose to replace the dollar system with cryptocurrency in order to reform America’s military and reverse its decay. They believe the current military status quo is ineffective and calamitous and the government should contract out small private armies.

More importantly, they plan to put the imperial ambitions of an ailing empire to bed for good. That means goodbye to NATO; Ukraine and Europe will be abandoned to Russian wolves. The revolutionaries also propose to deport millions of illegal aliens and secure the Mexican border. So yes, we are witnessing an incredible political realignment. This new order has the potential to unleash more furies than the Bolshevik Revolution.

Let’s loop back to Musk’s mysterious Latin declaration. It reminded me of a similar outburst made by Adolf Hitler during a 1941 speech at the Berlin Sports Palace. (What is history but hubris chasing tragedy?) Hitler, of course, praised authoritarian regimes and warmly described his 1933 revolution that dismantled German parliamentary democracy as one of history’s most far-reaching events. Europeans, he advised, should prepare for more greatness to come. “The year 1941 will be, I am convinced, the historical year of a great European New Order.”

So let me begin this rumination on Trump’s victory by citing a few revolutionary Trumpists. The rhetoric comes from a new magazine called IM-1776, and it sets the revolutionary scene with élan. The editor is Italian. He lives in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a friend of Trump’s, has proudly declared his nation an illiberal democracy. To that end, Hungary has dismantled the legal system and criminalized much journalism. (Former Canadian Conservative PM Stephen Harper, by the way, is a faithful admirer.) The magazine also sponsors events such as talks by Erik Prince, the former navy SEAL who built the military contracting group Blackwater. Prince envisions a world where a U.S. government can place bounties on bad guys such as Mexican cartels and their Chinese suppliers. Mandalorians will do the rest.

Like many new American revolutionaries, Prince thinks America’s biggest problem is affluenza. “Things have gotten so comfortable that people have forgotten how to ‘embrace the suck.’ Meaning, it’s good to get used to being uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable.”

There is more. The magazine not only eloquently quotes Hegel but offers cogent reviews of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Megalopolis, a meditation on the collapse of civilizations. Other articles quote the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt with authority and seriously celebrate the ideas of total mobilization by Ernst Jünger, a German war hero who openly hated the Weimar Republic and quietly despised the Nazis.

Other pieces praise the thought of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who thinks technology can “resurrect the Judeo-Christian civilization.” Thiel is a fan of Jünger, a fervent supporter of Trump and a mentor to Trump’s revolutionary vice-president, JD Vance.

But to grasp the seriousness and totality of the revolution coming to America now, consider IM-1776’s editorial on America’s new political mandate. It describes Trump as “the iconic embodiment of the American genius in all of its multitudes” and as the antidote to “the politics of madness, lies and fear.” It then launches into a screed so fervent that it might make even Lenin blush. Mark the tone and the contents:

“It is necessary to break the power of the old regime completely, not out of vengeance but a matter of realism. What is required is a clean-up operation comparable to Denazification, or Reconstruction. The nomenklatura [Russian for bureaucrats] cannot be allowed to remain in position. The ballot harvesting machine that subverted the 2020 election must be liquidated, and voting protocols cleaned up around the country. The mass migration machine must be destroyed and the illegal migrants it delivered to America deported. Antifa criminal networks, their financial backers, and their journalists and academic apologists should face RICO investigations. Universities should be purged of party activists, and activist disciplines abolished. Not only in the United States, but across the U.S. Empire, the regime’s political machine must be completely dismantled.”

RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Have I got your attention?

Revolutions come in all sizes, seasons and fashions. All are driven by discontent. The same angry social forces that have unsettled Europe, paralyzed Israeli politics and turned Argentina upside down just routed the Democratic party.

Meanwhile, Trump mimicry has become a blazing global political force, and British Columbia is no exception. Popular discontent reanimated a dead Conservative party that offered voters a “maple syrup MAGA.” It nearly defeated the New Democrats in a recent election. And these same revolutionary flames will most likely engulf Canada’s so-called natural governing party, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, unless a left-wing populist political movement arises to grab the baton from Pierre Poilievre.

And that is why it is important to stop and recognize the gravity of the moment and ask: Why did Trump win so decisively? We cannot change the times we live in, but we can choose how to engage them. But if we don’t understand why these revolutionary forces have grown so strong and so quickly, democracies won’t be able to marshal a coherent response. Blaming voters is no strategy. This is why Liberals and the left need to look in the mirror and examine their repeated failures to take on the dangerous forces gnawing away at the foundations of democracies. Identity politics has the effect of putting a smiley face on a deadly calculation: money and power. The erosion of citizenship induced by unprecedented concentration of wealth is now propelled by destructive technologies and their masters. Be afraid.

Are US voters stupid?

Most folks tend to react to Trump’s triumph in one of three ways. (And if you remain in deep shock about recent events, snap the hell out of it: you will need much clarity in the chaotic months to come.)

Most of my progressive friends attribute Trump’s victory solely to the stupidity of the American people. “How could they vote for such a fucking narcissist?” It’s true that mass movements do induce a drug-like trance and an altered sense of reality. But this reductionist explanation comes with a big hole. Just what then is the cure for this massive outbreak of stupidity? And why has this stupidity broken out in every struggling democracy? Surely, there must be an app for such a thing? And isn’t stupidity a non-partisan trait? I reject this explanation.

Others argue that 40 years of reality TV, talk radio and social media engineered the majority of America’s working class to vote for a convicted felon, a Russian asset and a devoted con man. Didn’t these people read all the wonderful economic statistics that suggest inflation is on the wane and a better life awaits? This argument has much merit, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. It again suggests that the 75 million people behaved as lemmings. I think many just wanted to give a throbbing finger to a patronizing ruling class, and damn the consequences.

Tucker Carlson, the second most dangerous man in America (and you’ll meet the first), wrote in 2016, before his conversion to MAGA, “Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.” There is truth there.

And then there is a third and entirely unpopular explanation. Maybe, just maybe, America’s ruling class got what they deserved. Maybe the Democrats, a party of largely educated and urban elites or MANGOs (members of media, academia and NGOs), abandoned the working class long ago. Maybe their centrist policies and almost idealess campaign let the MAGA folks fill the void with revolutionary promises of “fixing things.” Maybe, as the philosopher John Gray has so aptly put it, “Populism is a term liberals use to describe the political blow back against the social disruption that their policies have created.”

Maybe we can define some of these disruptive forces at play, and maybe there are many we don’t fully understand. Maybe there are deep disorienting waves eroding social unity in democracies that include inflation, immigration, the opioid overdose crisis, technological disruption, foreign propaganda, social disorder and the legacy of COVID. Maybe these waves of community turbulence have so unsettled people that they are vulnerable to angry calls for disruption and revolution. Maybe the left has underestimated their corrosive powers?

Maybe societies without shared norms become increasingly authoritarian. Maybe fear and anxiety, whether induced by social media or economic realities, can drive people into the iron embrace of authoritarians. Maybe naive optimism is a shitty political philosophy in an age of revolutions. Maybe a society that trades information for wisdom is doomed to be undone by disinformation. Maybe class, not identity, matters most in politics. Maybe liberalism is failing under the weight of history and the ecological crisis. Maybe it’s all of these things, and many more that we can’t yet fathom.

Lewis H. Lapham, a noble American journalist, spent most of his life skewering America’s ruling class. He knew because he was one of them. Lapham recognized that Trump was not a surprise or an aberration but a confirmation of the empire’s descent into frivolity. He warned that a weakened but still operational democracy had given way to stupefied, dysfunctional plutocracy. Ralph Nader called it a “spoiled political system.”

A plutocracy is a class of people who derive their power from wealth. They include people like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos and the oil-soaked Wilks brothers in Texas. The predatory behaviours of these robber barons explain why 50 per cent of Americans struggle with 2.5 per cent of the nation’s wealth while 10 per cent play at murderous politics with 70 per cent.

That reality is a democracy killer. When a republic starts quoting billionaires, celebrating billionaires, and lets its elections and political parties be manipulated by billionaires, it is no longer a functioning democracy. And now Trump proposes to open the doors of the American government to even more looting billionaires. What could possibly go wrong?

A charade has now become a death-defying circus on the edge of a cliff.

Lapham thought journalism, if it retained any purpose in this crazy world, was not to reveal the unknown but rather to place “what everybody knows into a coherence sequence.” He also thought the premise of my vanishing trade was to open things up and “not to wrap them neatly up.”

In that spirit, let me make a few critical and counterintuitive observations about Trump’s revolution and why it triumphed. In many respects America’s ruling class simply failed to see the moment. What they didn’t grasp can be broken down into several themes: the marginalization of the working class; the power of the “American Hologram”; the advance of techno-feudalism; the crisis of manhood; the immigrant dilemma; the power of Finkelstein’s formula; the condescension of liberals; and why democracies have become breeding grounds for counter-elites hell-bent on revolution.

Surprisingly, MAGA and hyper-liberalism or woke culture (the forming of political alliances among groups identified by gender, race, sex and geography instead of class) have much more in common than either camp would ever care to admit. Both are revolutionary movements driven by elite overproduction. Dissidents in both camps have engaged in exhaustive culture wars that have paradoxically displaced raging economic inequalities and working people as the engine of politics in North America. And whom does that ultimately serve? The plutocrats. They would rather have us arguing about pronouns and bathrooms than about ruinous tax breaks for the rich or the authoritarian programs of Silicon Valley.

The world has many failings when it comes to race and sex, but maybe it is time to question the hyper-liberal approach to addressing social injustice. Maybe the institutionalization of movements seeking an end to racism and misogyny can be counterproductive: should citizens need a highly paid consultant and an encyclopedia of abbreviations and a new vocabulary to treat their fellow citizens with dignity? Could it be that when identity becomes the coin of the realm, the character of our politicians no longer matters while our needed focus on the power of oligarchs fades?

What happens to the responsibilities of citizenship when people are encouraged to pledge allegiance to an identity? Look at the petrostate of Alberta, where Danielle Smith, a Trumpian, practises a corrosive identity politics based on geography: it’s Albertans versus the known liberal world.

So why do I care so passionately about the fate of the United States of America? I am the son of a Wisconsin nurse who often told tales at the dinner table about the courageous left-wing populism of Robert (Fighting Bob) La Follette. He championed farmers and fought the oligarchs, she said. She would puff on a cigarette, sigh and then curse the gangsterism of Sen. Joe McCarthy. The opposing currents of America’s political life run long and deep, and they crossed my dinner plate.

In my youth I attended a Mae Carden school in Southern California where we read Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson. We did not deconstruct these good authors. We read books to appreciate the wealth of the human experience. At school we memorized the constitution and parsed the speeches of presidents at a time when they were still literate. In a half-assed way, the empire still cared about citizens then.

Most Americans understood that their country’s democracy thrived not on the wealth of its tycoons but on the quality of its citizens. That America, along with my scout leader, died in Vietnam when the ruling class brightly lied and lied to defend an imperial debacle.

Globalization murdered much more of the American spirit, and now a nation of disoriented consumers faces a bold revolution funded by plutocrats with deep ties to authoritarians around the world. It is not a touching story.

Abandoning deer hunters with Jesus

Years ago, the U.S. journalist Joe Bageant, a working-class guy from Virginia, wrote about America’s class war in Deer Hunting with Jesus. In particular, he painted a vivid portrait of the lives of white rednecks and white trash. They held no degrees and owned no passports. They didn’t control the conditions of their workplaces, and inhabited an insular world just like America’s coastal elites. In fact the two rarely met.

Bageant lamented that America had dedicated only two gods for working people: television and petroleum. (Since Bageant’s death, these gods have morphed into social media, opioids and fracked petroleum.) He also understood how the liberal class had marginalized working people as hicks, hillbillies, disposables, Bible-thumpers and troubling gun owners.

Along with the journalist Thomas Frank, Bageant was one of the first to warn about a dynamic that turbocharged Trump’s revolution. It was this: “the thick-headed denial of what is obvious to nearly every thinking white person: A class conflict is being played out between the Scots-Irish culture and what James Webb rightly called America’s ‘paternalistic Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers.’ Whether educated liberals believe this or not, it is true. Tens of millions of Scots Irish and thousands of Scots Irish-influenced communities believe it is true and vote as if it is true, and that makes it true.”

Most Latino and Black working people, many of whom voted for Trump, wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. And now 40 per cent of Americans don’t have the cash to pay for a household emergency costing $1,000. If the left had identified and dealt with the growing immiseration of working people of all colours decades ago (and Biden made some piecemeal efforts), the Trump revolution would not be now knocking at our doors.

Let’s add to this equation another Trump fact: Steve Bannon, the revolutionary Trumpist who can’t wait to hear the primal scream of a dying regime and go medieval on his enemies, hails from Virginia. He’s a working-class kid. He saw exactly what Bageant saw and steered the ship accordingly. That’s what revolutionaries do.

The American Hologram

Most of us now live in a tech-mediated world where social media and podcasts hold our consciousness and attention like zombies in a food court. Bageant had a great expression for this dangerous development. He called it the American Hologram.

“We suffer under a mass national hallucination,” he wrote. “Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a ‘theater state.’”

In the hologram four furies dance with time: emotion, fear, ignorance and propaganda. Like Russians, Americans, the sons and daughters of Puritans, have always had a fondness for paranoia and conspiracies. It is part of the American character.

These dynamics have all intensified since Bageant’s death in 2011. Technology has sharpened and extended the reach of the hologram with podcasts, TikTok influencers, X accounts, foreign saboteurs and algorithms of biblical rage. At the same time social media has permitted political forces from Obama’s promisers of false hope to propagandists for the radical right to target working people with even greater accuracy and precision.

Trump has one genius: the former TV reality star has mastered the art of performing in the American Hologram. As the devil’s apprentice, he instinctively knows what to say and do in the electric coliseum to hold our attention. In such an environment Trump cynically understands that elections have been reduced to gladiatorial combat. Facts don’t matter and solutions aren’t proffered. It’s blood and rage. In times of danger, propaganda puts people into a dream world, and the dreamers are now all around us. Many are revolutionaries.

The nihilistic politics of social media, of course, engender nihilistic voters. A poll of voters between the ages of 18 and 30 recently found most don’t believe the political system works for them. They see only a decaying system that serves money and power. Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor, “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

Social critics such as Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and lawyer, propose a direct response to the hologram: the left urgently needs to build a bigger and better communications matrix. “Democrats aren’t going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem that extends to podcasts and every social media platform and can pierce the right-wing propaganda bubble,” she wrote on X. “It doesn’t matter if you delivered on the economy or we are actually safer if people are being pummeled by domestic and foreign disinformation that crime and inflation are up. It’s an information war at this point.”

I have several problems with Rangappa’s argument. Statistics don’t always reflect reality and people have different ways of defining safety. Yes, crime has actually gone down, but social disorder has dramatically escalated throughout North America. It manifests itself as more shit on the streets, larger homeless encampments, open drug use, rampant shoplifting and fleets of stolen cars. The left has a tendency to diminish these unsettling events while the right pounces on the growing insecurity like a rapacious cat.

Rangappa’s appeal for better communications isn’t a bad idea, but it won’t make much of a difference if the left doesn’t ponder its reluctance to take on the concentration of money and technology. It won’t move the dial in the absence of visionary leadership and inspirational ideas. Adding more propaganda to an already polluted information system will not restore our political health.

And then there is the appalling problem of ownership. Right now, one outrageously wealthy man, Elon Musk, claims to operate “the world’s town hall” on X. Replacing tens of thousands of town halls with just one angry outlet concentrates power and defies evolutionary sense. Absolute power, of course, corrupts absolutely.

So we probably need to ask another set of questions. What if the true problem is the very totalitarian character of an information system that has suspended all human affairs in a hologram?

What does the left propose to do when people discover that the tech boys really don’t give a fuck about democracy? And once the social well has been poisoned with misinformation, how can you ever go back and clean up public discourse?

The other truth here is obvious: the left brought a knife to a social media gun fight, and lost.

MAGA and elite overproduction

One of the great forces of history remains elite overproduction. As hyper-capitalism concentrates wealth into smaller circles of power, great sections of society are left to furiously compete for smaller pieces of the pie. Whenever a society starts churning out more elite aspirants than it has capacity to gainfully absorb, they will grow unhappy. Armed with grievances, they’ll start causing their own brand of trouble to get the lives they feel they deserve. The historian Peter Turchin calls this a “revolutionary situation.” And it is.

Elite overproduction can be measured by the number of surplus lawyers set loose in a modern society. Many have found a home for their ambitions in MAGA. These anti-regime warriors and counter-elites destabilized American politics by taking over the Republican party and now propose to remake the American empire. As Turchin shrewdly observes in End Times, people like Tucker Carlson, JD Vance and Steve Bannon are all examples of men with elite credentials with a raft of grievances. These nationalist conservatives now propose to emancipate democracy from itself. Bannon, for example, calls himself a Leninist. And as a Leninist, he wants “to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Lawyers who find their aspirations choked by surplus competitors make good candidates to lead revolutionary movements. Robespierre, Lenin and Castro were all lawyers. “The truly dangerous revolutionaries are frustrated elite aspirants who have the privileges, training, and connections to enable them to wield influence at scale,” notes Turchin. JD Vance, the most dangerous man in America, got his law degree from Yale and was mentored by Peter Thiel, a tech baron with his own revolutionary aspirations.

The techno-feudalists

The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis has argued that capitalism has morphed into a different leviathan. It once supported social democracies, but that model died more than a decade ago. He says it has been replaced by a sort of techno-feudalism in which a couple of powerful Silicon lords charge rent for their services, making us all digital serfs.

“Value extraction has increasingly shifted away from markets” and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Amazon, says Varoufakis. These monopolies operate like private fiefdoms and harbour an entirely different social agenda that is messianic. First and foremost, they champion acceleration of the techno-capital machine regardless of the social consequences. They believe technology can conquer any imaginable environmental problem, and that’s why they don’t give a fuck about climate change or dying oceans. (If the technologies fail, Musk will whisk a million people off the planet to Mars in 2050 and thereby ensure the species’ survival.) They also believe that a citizen’s highest civic duty is to advance technology.

Many Silicon tycoons openly regard democracies as antique platforms that have become obstacles to progress. They even talk about going beyond politics altogether. The billionaire Peter Thiel thinks, “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.” So the ascension of Elon Musk to the highest ranks in MAGA should come as no surprise. It is another revolutionary development. God knows how long this crazy union will last, or what the peasants will eventually do.

Missing the male crisis

An inordinate number of young men voted for Trump, and there is a reason for that, as well as a blunt message. No one really talks about the modern crisis of manhood these days, but it remains a sad and intractable phenomenon.

The modern economy champions automation and doesn’t care much for muscle anymore. The robots are here, and more are coming. Women flock to universities while men do not. The modern masculine ideal remains a burning question in search of an answer.

You can measure this crisis any number of graphic ways: the risk of dying by suicide is four times higher for boys and men than for women. Men have a two to three times greater rate of overdose mortality from opioids (like fentanyl and heroin) than women. Boys born into the poorest households are twice as likely to remain dirt poor than girls raised in the same environment, and that’s Canadian data. During the pandemic the decline in college enrolment for male students was seven times that of female students. Men feel increasingly lost, fragile and purposeless. I could go on.

Trump’s Republicans offered men a macho carnival complete with WWE characters. The Democrats thought they could count on female votes and ceded the ground. They also ran a pretty condescending 30-second clip about how “what happens in the booth stays in the booth.”

The left could have talked about the need for better trade schools and apprenticeship programs but didn’t. “What men heard from the right was: you’ve got problems, we don’t have solutions. What they heard from the left is: you don’t have problems, you are the problem. And between those two choices, it’s not really surprising to me that more men chose the Republican one,” noted Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

A lot of liberals have concluded that misogyny and sexism prevailed in this election and God knows the alt-right champions these vulgarities. But blaming men only strengthens the radical right’s hold on them, and that’s a perilous development. The Democrats had two candidates (Kamala Harris and Tim Walz) capable of addressing the plight of modern manhood in practical terms; they didn’t make the pitch. Politically, it was a massive miscalculation.

The immigration dilemma

The mass movement of immigrants around the world for economic and political reasons, often at the behest of corporations, has generated heated debate. It has also unsettled democracies and energized right-wing radicals from Canada to Austria. The issue figured prominently in Trump’s revolution thanks to Biden’s open border folly, and to repeated lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. (That community, by the way, voted overwhelmingly for Trump.)

So let’s consider the basic political ecology of immigration for a moment.

No matter where uprooted people come from, they must enter an alien society and culture. As a result, they tend to cluster in particular places, which obviously changes the tenor of daily life including wages.

The newcomers build familiar ethnic enclaves to survive the transition. (My ancestors came from what Trump would call “the shitholes” of the day: Norway and Ukraine.) As a result, immigration invariably sparks some tensions between long-standing working populations and the wide-eyed arrivals. It is a given, and there is a gauntlet. But if elites don’t ensure there is enough housing, schooling, jobs and health care for the newcomers, social sparks will become ruinous political conflagrations such as the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s America.

Spectacular policy failures occur when established working people must compete with arrivals for decent housing and health care. Think Canada’s experience here. There is a reason Bernie Sanders, a truly left-wing Democrat, has argued that open borders are a bad idea: “That’s a Koch brothers proposal.” It benefits capital at the expense of community. (It also has enormous climate implications because every new arrival wants a life with a larger carbon footprint.)

Now consider Germany’s recent experience. Chancellor Angela Merkel thought her nation, with a population of 82 million in 2015, could absorb what has now become 3.4 million refugees from nations as varied as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. “We’ll manage this,” she vowed nine years ago. Germany did. But it has come with a potentially fatal political price. The AfD, an extremely right-wing party, stands poised to destabilize the German state by capitalizing on widespread anti-immigrant sentiment. If the AfD succeeds, Germany will fall victim to another pro-Russian revolution.

Russia, meanwhile, has been funding and fanning nationalist movements for decades in Europe. It strategically bombed Syrian cities with the specific goal of sending waves of refugees into the continent to destabilize and radicalize its politics.

The effusive communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently asked a delicate question: When is the left going to have honest conversation about immigration and its political consequences? Just exactly what are the causes of this crisis? Who benefits from open borders? Why don’t wealthy regimes like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates accept refugees from the Middle East? And how is immigration serving the Ponzi scheme of economic growth?

“The solution is not just, ‘let’s open our borders, and all will come in,’” notes Žižek. “This, I think, is the first step towards a catastrophe. I am trying to understand the concerns of ordinary people without condoning racism.”

The American and Canadian left might want to do the same.

The power of Finkelstein’s formula

Arthur Finkelstein, the Republican pollster, libertarian and mathematician, came up with a formula for killing democracies years ago. It evolved as a learning experience in the game of politics. It began with his successful contributions to the campaigns of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He then branched out to other countries. He experimented in Israel, where he created the strongman known as Jener Benjamin Netanyahu. He later teamed up with George Eli Birnbaum and perfected the formula in Hungary. That campaign ended social democracy there, and propelled Viktor Orbán, a lawyer, to power in 2010. Orbán then changed the election and legal system to extend his rule.

The reclusive pollster, a witty man, elaborated on the volatile ingredients during a talk he gave in Prague in 2011. He said the fragmentation of information and the speed at which it could be delivered had changed politics in explosive ways. Whenever you add inflation and unemployment and social disorder to the mix, all a political engineer has to do is redirect the rage. Rage is a wildfire that will consume any democratic forest.

Finkelstein’s formula — an algorithm for undoing democracies — was brilliant. Attack, attack and attack. Find an enemy. It doesn’t matter if they are Mexicans, immigrants, Justin Trudeau or the billionaire George Soros. Repeat the message: "ultraliberal," "crazy liberal" or "shameful liberal." Trap the opponent in crazy accusations. Let the opponent, who rarely recognizes their weaknesses, fall into the trap. After a close victory, and Finkelstein specialized in close victories, find another enemy. Before he died in 2017, Finkelstein knew he had unleashed a monster: "I wanted to change the world. I did that. I made it worse."

The army of strategists, consultants and social engineers that serve liberal and progressive political parties know this formula. Hell, it just played out in B.C., and it dominates Alberta’s politics. Yet these same professionals have largely behaved as though it weren’t an existential threat to democracies. Why did so many U.S. progressives arrogantly dismiss this calculus as “weird” and leave it at that?

The patronizing left

Now here’s something else to chew on in these revolutionary times. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi recently had a chat with the well-known U.S. economist Tyler Cowen. They talked about al-Gharbi’s book on the rise and fall of woke culture.

In the course of the conversation al-Gharbi, who is Muslim, made a critical point about research I hadn’t heard about: When Republican conservatives talk to Latinos or Blacks and ask them “What’s your job?” or “What do you do?” they ask those kinds of questions the same whether they’re talking to a Black person or a white person. But when many Democrats and liberals talk to ordinary people, they downshift. Their tone changes, and so, too, does the language. “They talk in simpler language and in a way that’s kind of patronizing,” noted al-Gharbi.

So let that observation sink in for a moment, because we have all observed it among American politicians. I would add that liberal condescension is driving a political realignment in Canada, too. Perhaps Pierre Poilievre’s greatest political weakness is that he often sounds as patronizing as Trudeau. Ordinary people have an ear for such things.

What ecological crisis?

During the U.S. election little or nothing was said by either candidate about the backdrop to the global democratic crisis: our biological Armageddon. This long-term predicament includes climate disruption, massive biological losses, intensifying water shortages, soil erosion, declining fertility, energy bottlenecks, unsustainable cities and dying oceans.

Meanwhile the temperatures keep rising and the fires keep burning. Species extinction has intensified while insect and bird populations have crashed. As wildlife diversity declines, viruses will seek new hosts in human populations, spawning new pandemics. A reassessment of the Limits to Growth study concluded that human societies are poised for collapse around 2040 if they don’t change their economic behaviours altering the biosphere.

So, is it any wonder that in an absence of any acknowledgment of these realities in the American Hologram, a revolutionary call for greatness prevailed?

In the face of ecological and political collapse, it remains an open question as to whether Americans or anyone else really cares about self-preservation. Those that skew liberal propose a centrist solution: Let’s talk and buy one of Musk’s electric cars. But here’s the real problem: Our primate brains can’t really grasp the urgency of the biological crisis, especially when it conveniently disappears from polite conversation. Our political and social institutions have evolved to deal with a successful fat and easy life, not catastrophes, dead ends, upheavals and extinctions. Daniel Brooks, an evolutionary biologist, adds the obvious: “Human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news.”

Žižek, a rambunctious philosopher, has scolded the left for years for letting the right take over debates on immigration and identity politics. He calls himself a “moderate conservative communist” and then laughs with a big roar. When was the last time you met a laughing “law and order leftist”? How disarming.

Everyone can see that the authoritarians are gunning for capitalist democracies. The funders of the populous right have been stockpiling the ammunition for years: ruinous wealth and pathological technologies. But the left hasn’t yet come up with a valid response other than blaming voters, Žižek reminds. It has forgotten how to build broad coalitions to fight economic inequality, let alone how to speak to the deer hunters with Jesus. Yet the crisis beckons.

In many ways the Trump triumph, which may explode under its own contradictions, has provided the left with an opportunity to snap out of its incoherence and come back to reality. Maybe, just maybe, it is time for a visionary populist movement that challenges the concentration of money and technology with a practical plan for civilization’s survival. Maybe that is the only way to fight right-wing populism funded by techno-optimists. The situation, says Žižek, is open and fluid.

You know, adds the philosopher, the world now faces a plurality of troubles from the ecological crisis to mass migrations and war. “We have to get ready for these emergency states. If the left doesn’t do it, the right will do it in a fascist way.”