Mainstream extremism: the origins of denial

Helena Norberg-Hodge, an author and documentary film producer who advocates for a local solution to world economic problems, wrote a fascinating summary of her views in a short article, “Globalization and extremism—join the dots”, that was published in the November-December 2019 edition of the British newsmagazine, “The New Internationalist”. In that article, she started off in the same way that I also began many of my own blogposts, by trying to find out why, in today’s world, there are so many “rightwing authoritarian leaders and extremist political parties gaining strength” in so many different countries, such as Donald Trump’s USA, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Her answer to that question is that worldwide economic globalization has not only caused an enormous social problem, “expanding the obscene gap between rich and poor”, but has also caused the majority of the world’s population to feel politically and psychologically, as well as economically, insecure. In her view, these related varieties of globalized insecurity have made millions of people “highly susceptible to false narratives purporting to explain their precarious situation”. As she describes it, people’s economic insecurity is especially based on job insecurity, caused by “footloose corporations” eliminating even long-held jobs, through “downsizing and offshoring, mergers and takeovers, artificial intelligence and automation”. To explain where this job insecurity comes from, pro-capitalist, rightwing, authoritarian politicians refuse to blame giant global corporations for ruining so many working-class lives, and choose instead to manipulate millions of susceptible people into blaming big government, immigrants and minorities for their problems. In spite of the fact (I might add) that most of the immigrants and the members of minority groups also belong to the same working-class as the majority populations, a class that has become much bigger and more worldwide than it ever used to be.

Norberg-Hodge also emphasized in her article just how ironic it is to blame big government for any of those policies by pointing out that the political insecurity that millions of people are also feeling, comes from the fact that most governments are being impoverished by the huge subsidies and tax breaks that they have been foolishly handing out “to attract big business” in the first place. Leaving those governments unable “to cover the heavy social and environmental costs of global growth”, and causing ordinary people to “see their government leaders as inept at running the nation’s affairs”, as well as getting them to support imitating the success of big business by running “the country (even) more like a business”. She also points out how psychological insecurity resulting from the “social fragmentation and isolation” caused by “the undermining of local and national economies”, coupled with the enormous consumerist propaganda of global advertising, has succeeded in getting millions of people to replace what she considers to be relatively healthy, local identities with extremely unhealthy, ultra rightwing, extremist and fundamentalist, identities instead.

Curiously enough, I happened to come across Norberg-Hodge’s article when I was also in the process of reading British socialist leader Chris Harman’s monumental book (728 pages), “A people’s history of the world: From the stone age to the new millenium”, first published back in 2008. I was particularly fascinated by Norberg-Hodge’s description of the “economic transformation driven by the deregulation of global banks and corporations, largely through free-trade treaties”, while “businesses and individuals at the national and local level are burdened with ever heavier regulations and squeezed for taxes to subsidize transnationals that pay almost no tax.” That seemed to me to be almost a kind of logical extension of Harman’s description of how social-class oppression itself came into being, when the first regional empires were originally set up over 5000 years ago by ruling-class merchants and aristocrats. Those newly-dominant folks were intent on persuading much more numerous, ordinary peasants and artisans that they (the rulers) were the only ones capable of representing everyone in civilized society. They began to see “their control over resources as being in the interests of society as a whole”, “themselves remaining fit, well and protected from the famines and impoverishment that periodically afflicted the population as a whole” (page 25). In other words, neoliberalism could very well be just the latest, most up-to-date version of what has been unfortunately going on in most human societies for the past several thousand years!

I certainly agree with many of Norberg-Hodge’s contributions to the ongoing debate over the causes of mainstream global extremism. My take on those same authoritarian radicals that she was talking about is that they are all a bunch of neofascist politicians, whose intense hatred of all forms of socialism, and of any emphasis whatever on anything that all the people in the world have in common (the original definition of communism), forces them to focus on racial segregation and misogyny as two very useful ways of avoiding any talk about the even more intense division of today’s world into competing social classes. A division that has become even more obvious nowadays than it was back in the era of “classical” fascism during the first half of the twentieth century.

However, I cannot agree at all with Norberg-Hodge’s equation of “worldwide economic integration, or globalization”, since the Second World War, with what used to be called “development” in “the Global South” or “progress” in “the Global North”. It seems to me that we have to distinguish between what was going on in the world during the so-called “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975) and what has been emerging internationally since the joint, neoliberal and ultraconservative “counter-revolution” started up right afterwards. Following the 1945 victory of the liberal-communist coalition against classical fascism, there had ensued a short period of what German social-economist Wolfgang Streeck calls “democratic capitalism”. 

A very peculiar period of world history during which international capitalism had to contend with a competing “Eastern” bloc of nations theoretically focusing on promoting worldwide communism, and thereby forcing world capitalism to tone down its previously radical emphasis on laissez-faire. Which did not, however, prevent the military wing of capitalism from killing off several million pro-communist workers and peasants anyway, in order to “contain” the spread of the rival ideology. During which time, nevertheless, a certain amount of real economic development and real social progress was allowed to briefly co-exist, here and there, alongside ordinary capitalist and imperialist exploitation, inside both the Global North and the Global South.

That strange little period did not last very long, however, for two very important reasons. One was that the world’s most important private-capitalist investors, dominating most of the only slightly democratic governments of the Global North, had no intention of “sharing the wealth” (even a little bit), for any longer than absolutely necessary, with any of the “inferior” social classes of the North, or the equally “inferior” colonies (or semi-colonies) of the Global South. The other was that the leaders of the only-theoretically communist dictatorships of the “Eastern bloc” of nations betrayed the communist ideal almost from the outset and ran their governments with an iron fist, creating a “new class” (Milovan Djilas) of government bureaucrats to replace the bourgeois/aristocratic rulers of the past.

During the 1970s, the internal corruption inside each “communist” country, the division of the Eastern bloc into two warring factions (pro-Soviet “revisionists” versus pro-Chinese “maoists”), the emerging geopolitical alliance between the USA and China against the remaining members of the Soviet bloc, as well as the neocolonial corruption of the former “liberation movements” in the Global South and the largely-provoked decline in popularity of the communist and social-democratic parties in the “Western” part of the Global North, finally made it possible for the private capitalists in the Global North to abandon their temporary concessions and return to the vigorous pursuit of a revived form of laissez-faire known since the 1970s as neoliberalism.

It is in fact this “new” form of economic and social liberalism, putting an end not only to the “thirty glorious years”, but also to a long (85-year) period of succeeding crises of capitalism (the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War), that had fostered a kind of economic-nationalist (“neomercantilist”), or at least Keynesian, drift away from classical liberalism. When Helena Norberg-Hodge referred to those “footloose corporations” and their worldwide globalization causing political, economic, social and psychological insecurity, she was in fact describing the joint, post-1975 rise of both neoliberalism and neofascism, leading to an accompanying rise in the number of ultra-rightwing governments and movements. In other words, a phenomenon that I like to call “mainstream extremism”, that got its first experience with power when the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) handed that country’s economy over to the neoliberal economists from the USA known as “the Chicago boys”.

That South American extremist, and dozens of other military dictators just like him, were paradoxically but also very firmly and very directly, supported by the popularly-elected and re-elected regimes of Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979-1990) and Ronald Reagan in the USA (1981-1989). Both of them becoming champions of worldwide neoliberalism, anti-communism and anti-social-democracy, imitated by dozens of other rightwing clones since that time. The reactionary character of their regimes not being surpassed until the more recent rise of such even more antediluvian politicians as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Donald Trump in the USA, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and all the other half-neoliberal, half-neofascist atavists currently in power.

Not to forget that the neoliberal movement also got an enormous boost from the simultaneous “war on inflation” of the world’s most important central banks, led by US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. By simultaneously raising interest rates all over the world from about 5% to about 20% (!), between 1979 and 1981, those “monetarist” banks effectively wiped out inflation by deliberately causing the biggest recession that had afflicted the world since the Great Depression. An economic assault that not coincidentally also made it a great deal more difficult for increasingly indebted governments to maintain any kind of active role in managing the world economy.

To be sure, during the 1945-1975 period of (slightly more) democratic capitalism, as well as during the post-1975 period of mainstream extremism, the big-business private investors were most definitely extending their exploitation and control of both the “inferior” classes of the Global North and the “inferior” nations of the Global South. But during the “thirty glorious years”, they were not doing so with quite as much assurance, nor with quite as much intensity, as they have been since 1975. As for the former “Eastern” bloc of nations, all of them have now reintegrated the “brave new world” of neoliberalism and neofascism that has taken over the entire planet, even if some of them (such as the “People’s” Republic of China) are still run by almost completely totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism, however, currently exists not only in several formerly communist countries, but also in several other, very backward theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Both kinds of totalitarianism are even more radical forms of “mainstream extremism” than that currently running dozens of other countries, all over the world, including such “outstanding” examples as the USA, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Italy, India, Israel, Austria, Colombia, Zimbabwe and tutti quanti. Not to forget, in this ever-increasing list of rogue regimes, that the USA is still the most powerful country in the world (not only militarily, but also in many other ways), and therefore has the capacity to do more harm to the entire world population (as it already has in the recent past) than any other country in that list, including China (at least so far).

In today’s world, there are two main subjects about which most of the world’s neoliberal/neofascist leaders, and also most of their very numerous followers, engage in increasingly obvious denial of current reality. The first of these is the constant deterioration of the natural environment, caused by unprecedentedly high levels of pollution: agricultural waste, industrial waste and ordinary biological waste from almost eight billion people, none of which is being properly treated before being thrown into the air that we are forced to breathe, the water that we are forced to drink and the soil upon which we depend for most of our food.

Resulting, among many other extremely negative effects, in the kind of worldwide climate change that has already greatly expanded both the wildfire and extreme flooding seasons in dozens of different regions. Thereby also adding Donald-Trump clones like Australian prime minister Scott Morrison to the worldwide rogues’ gallery of backward, mainstream extremists. Moreover, the Chinese claim to have done more to end climate change than any other nation is bogus, since as Ma Tianjie explains in her own article (“How green is China?”, published in the same issue of “The New Internationalist” as the Norberg-Hodge article), for every Chinese coal mine recently closed by the regime, that country has financed the opening up of new coal mines, most of them in various Third World countries.

The second subject eliciting mainstream-extremist denial these days is an equally toxic confluence of all the different ways by which human beings are constantly mistreating each other, now more than ever before, especially through the unprecedentedly enormous income gap between the rich and the poor that Norberg-Hodge was mentioning. But also by the neofascist intensification of all the different kinds of exploitation and oppression (including the sexual kind) constantly being directed against the world’s poorest and least powerful categories of people, including most of the world’s women, many of the religious and ethnic minorities on every continent, and a very large percentage of the world’s children as well. The entire world-system, especially the legal branch of that system, seems intent on forever ensuring that none of the most oppressed and exploited people on the planet will ever come anywhere close to freedom.

It is as if all the world’s most reactionary antediluvians, running all the ultra-rightwing movements and governments in every country, were collectively screaming at the top of their lungs, “f—- the environment” and “f—-the common people”! To which they seem to be adding several more comments like these ones: “All the so-called ‘stakeholders’ in the world economy who are not good, upstanding shareholders like ourselves can just go to hell forever! We don’t want to have anything to do with the plight of the ignorant masses, nor with the God-forsaken natural environment! All we want is short-term profit maximization for all eternity, no matter what the cost! And to make sure that we have the power necessary to make ever more obscene gobs of money, we are going to lie and cheat and manipulate ordinary people even more than before, into enthusiastically supporting every last one of our fake ‘anti-establishment’, ultra-narcissist authoritarians, in every single country! We superior beings do not just want to lord it over the undeserving commoners like we have already been doing for thousands of years, we want them to truly enjoy being good, loyal slaves for us forever!”

After forty years of conjointly installing neoliberal and neofascist regimes all over the world, these incredibly disgusting individuals seem to be indulging in some kind of primitive childishness, or infantile egocentrism, blowing their stacks every time someone decides to stand up to them. They are constantly getting violently ticked off whenever some person, or some group, that they associate with “weakness”, does something unexpected, like a former victim accusing them of rape in public, or a previously battered spouse running off to a women’s shelter (thereby leaving them in the lurch), or a young, media-friendly person intensely worried about climate change, or a group of lower-class people banding together for the first time against economic and social domination, or a previously quiescent, “inferior” nation that suddenly gets indignant about foreign imperialism, or any other formerly servile, social entity that no longer tolerates some form or another of sadistic torture.

This is the sort of thing that Montreal newspaper columnist Pierre Trudel (“Le consentement”,  “Le Devoir”, January 7, 2020) was referring to when he wrote about victim Vanessa Springora’s so-called “consent” when she was sexually assaulted several decades ago, as a 14-year-old girl, by the well-known French author, Gabriel Matzneff, who has become very successful openly describing, in excruciating detail, his own sex crimes in his novels. Trudel’s conclusion about such cases, or any similar use of legal consent to “justify” the heinous acts of any other perpetrator of any other form of social violence, is completely illegitimate, since there is no such thing as “free consent” in any situation involving social inequality. To which I would add that given the prevalence of social inequality in practically every human situation, there really is not very much “free consent” going on in any top-down relationship whatsoever.

Of course, there are millions of people all over the world, just like Vanessa Springora, who are fighting back against all these ultra-reactionary individuals and their movements, including even a few people in high places who claim that they also support such progressive ideas as cleaning up the environment and putting an end to the more extreme varieties of exploitation and oppression. But none of that opposition to the joint domination of the world by people promoting different varieties of neoliberalism and neofascism seems to be having any real, long-lasting effect in human society, while the “open conspiracy” of ideological denial seems to be getting stronger and stronger with every passing day.

The mechanism by which all this denial of reality is taking place is exactly the same as the one already discovered by political sociologists in the USA, when they were trying to find out from whence the Trump phenomenon originated. Observers like Steve Tesich and Ralph Keyes posited that the whole idea of calling reality “fake news”, and simultaneously creating a “new reality” which would be more palatable to the points of view of ultra-reactionary people, came from the US defeat in the Vietnam War and the constitutional failures of the Watergate crisis (that also took place during that very decisive decade, the 1970s). Not being able to accept those two very negative realities, so completely unnerving to the ultra-proud American psyche, millions of ordinary people started believing in the almost “psychedelic” ideological inventions of that country’s ever-active populist opinion manipulators (such as Breitbart News Network and Fox News), who created a “better reality” for them than the one that existed in the much-too-negative, much too real, real world.

Fake, “reality-show” billionaire Donald Trump, with the help of Russian hackers further manipulating the already manipulative (and equally billionaire) social media, and the completely undemocratic Electoral College institution, then managed to turn that deliberately phoney worldview into an upset victory in the 2016 presidential election. Setting up a new regime combining most of the neoliberal policies of all the previous administrations (since 1981 in the USA) with a generous new layer of authoritarian neofascism. A process that also seems to apply quite well to all the other recent outbreaks of neofascism all over the world, not only in the countries mentioned by Norberg-Hodge, and all the other ones that I added to her list, but also in places like Russia, that have also experienced extremely debilitating recent events, tearing at the national and/or religious psyche.

Fake news, of course, has been around for a very long time, some of the earlier forms of which have been the equally strange systems of belief in supernatural phenomena known as religions. All the world’s known religions, as well as the somewhat newer kinds of reactionary beliefs (including Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century fantasy about “private vice creating public virtue”), seem to me to be have something in common with what some psychoanalysts refer to as reaction formations, by which aspects of reality deemed unacceptable give rise to imagined, ersatz inventions of the mind to make the world seem more psychologically palatable. Also more or less similar to what some of the psychotherapists studying borderline personality disorder refer to as pseudo-mentalization, describing how disturbed minds make up false representations of reality as a psychological coping mechanism for dealing with aspects of the real world that seem to them totally alien to their own well-established worldview.

The founders of ultra-right-wing (neofascist) populism, as well as most of its neoliberal fellow-travellers, also seem to be using “negative projection”, ascribing the term “fake news” to reality and accepting as reality the objects of their own feverish imaginations. Sometimes it seems that whenever someone, somewhere, gets upset about any kind of human travesty whatever, the ultra-reactionaries just retreat even more into their little fantasy worlds. A good example being any time that Greta Thunberg, or the scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accuse climate skeptics of doing nothing on purpose, they often end up (paradoxically) creating even more Donald Trump clones than those previously existing, all of them “doubling down” on the use of fossil fuels more than ever before. In other words, even though science is still progressing somewhat, even today, ignorance is getting even stronger than science has ever been, with the overall result that regression is trumping progression.

Which brings me to the other, even more important, reason why I cannot accept Helena Norberg-Hodge’s proposed solution to everything that is going on nowadays. In her article, she also devoted several paragraphs to describing the Ladakh society, “an Indian-administered region on the Tibetan Plateau” where she has been working for the past four decades. According to her account, it was the economic development of that region since the 1970s that got the Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority into fighting with each other over scarce resources, rather than cooperating together as they had in the past, when everyone was equally poor. A situation that according to her was further corrupted by the introduction of Westernized education and dependence on political decision-making centred in the distant government at New Delhi. In concluding her article, she definitely gave the impression that the solution to enormous divisions like these, all over the world, is to get as far away as possible from development, progress and “global economic deregulation”, and to return to localized harmony instead.

But I really do not see how we can possibly get the genie back into the bottle. In my opinion, Norberg-Hodge has made the fundamental error of confounding the kind of deregulated, free-trade-oriented globalization introduced by the neoliberal juggernaut during the late 1970s with any alternative form of globalization. She did not even consider the possibility that real development and real progress could theoretically have put an end to widespread poverty and to the constant reinforcement of social inequality, if globalization had not been carried out almost exclusively under the control of the world’s most backward, big-time investors, economists and politicians. A good example of which is the European Union, which set up a smaller, regional version of deregulated globalization that was supposed to have also included a concerted, regional “war on poverty”, but somehow “never got around” to doing anything of the sort.

Back in the 1945-1975 period, many communist and social-democratic movements and governments, on every continent, were at least theoretically promoting a much more progressive form of globalization. If the neoliberal and neofascist movements had not joined together to take over the world as they did in the late 1970s, a completely different kind of globalization could have been put into place instead, focusing on worldwide cooperation and genuinely progressive development for poor and middle-class people, and not just for the ultra-rich ones. Who knows, it might even have adopted a much more ecologically friendly attitude back then towards the natural environment than the totally indifferent, or even downright hostile, attitude most world leaders have adopted nowadays.

Unfortunately, the kind of local traditions that are popular in every part of the world are exactly the kind of ultra-conservative traditions that classical fascists used to promote back in the twentieth century, and that today’s neofascist politicians are promoting all over again. Things like the caste system in India, still affecting not only the majority Hindu community in that country, but also copied by most of India’s important minorities, such as the largest sections of the Muslim community. Also things like excision, forced marriages of very young girls, priestly pedophilia in most of the world’s Catholic communities, polygamy, the death penalty for apostasy, the stoning of “witches”, “conversion therapy” for homosexuals, deference to feudal authority, and so on and so forth, the list is endless. Every major religion in the world today, and most of the minor ones as well, especially their ultra-conservative, fundamentalist (“evangelical”) offshoots, are all ancient depositories of reactionary behaviour, constantly being dusted off and revived by every single neofascist movement in the entire world.

Norberg-Hodge’s disparaging references to Western education, that replaced local cultural traditions among the Ladakh people, also sounds a bit too much like the Nigerian form of Islamic neofascism, “Boko Haram”, whose very name means “Western education is sinful”. I have nothing at all against incorporating traditional agricultural techniques into an overall program of genuine development of local economies, that bureaucratic governments very often tend to completely ignore. But that is not the same as rejecting Western education altogether, as if it did not include any positive elements whatsoever and was exclusively dedicated to maximizing short-term profit for multinational banks and global corporations. It seems to me that Norberg-Hodge, as well as the Indian bureaucrats to which she refers, are much too focused on extreme ideological division (“either/or” clivage) between 100% opposing ideas, rather than focusing on significantly reducing the more extreme kinds of exploitation and oppression, step by step, year after year, thereby reversing today’s extremely unacceptable trend of the constant worsening of the human condition.