Author: Oliver Eagleton

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Sleepwalking Elites

President Joe Biden departs, followed by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after a news conference in the East Room of the White House, Monday, Feb. 7, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

When I studied modern history and the wars of the eighteenth century at school, it seemed absurd to me that hundreds of thousands of people had died for some remote fortress or a handful of small villages. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) concluded with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt, in which the towns of Breisach and Kehl on the Rhine and Pinerolo in Piedmont changed hands. In that war, between 700,000 and 1.2 million people died, out of a European population around 120 million including Russia. Scaled up to the current population, the equivalent death-toll would be between 4.2 and 7.2 million.

Ten years ago, nobody could have imagined that Europe would risk such a catastrophe for the sake of the Donbass – a region that few of us would have been able to locate on a map. But now this is a plausible outcome of the constantly escalating conflict in Ukraine. Below is a list, compiled by the State Department, of weapons systems, munitions, drones, missiles, etc. given by the United States to Ukraine over the course of the war. I provide it not out of fastidiousness, but to highlight the cumulative effect of arms shipment after arms shipment:

  • Over 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
  • Over 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems;
  • Over 50,000 other anti-armor systems and munitions;
  • Over 700 Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • 160 155mm Howitzers and up to 1,094,000 155mm artillery rounds;
  • Over 5,800 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds;
  • 10,200 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine (RAAM) Systems;
  • 100,000 rounds of 125mm tank ammunition;
  • 45,000 152mm artillery rounds;
  • 20,000 122mm artillery rounds;
  • 50,000 122mm GRAD rockets;
  • 72 105mm Howitzers and 370,000 105mm artillery rounds;
  • 298 Tactical Vehicles to tow weapons;
  • 34 Tactical Vehicles to recover equipment;
  • 30 ammunition support vehicles;
  • 38 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and ammunition;
  • 30 120mm mortar systems and approximately 166,000 120mm mortar rounds;
  • 10 82mm mortar systems;
  • 10 60mm mortar systems;
  • 2,590 Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles;
  • 545,000 rounds of 25mm ammunition;
  • 120mm ammunition;
  • Ten Command Post vehicles;
  • One Patriot air defense battery and munitions;
  • Eight National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and munitions;
  • Missiles for HAWK air defense systems;
  • RIM-7 missiles for air defense;
  • 12 Avenger air defense systems;
  • High-speed Anti-radiation missiles (HARMs);
  • Precision aerial munitions;
  • 4,000 Zuni aircraft rockets;
  • 20 Mi-17 helicopters;
  • 31 Abrams tanks;
  • 45 T-72B tanks;
  • 109 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles;
  • Over 1,700 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs);
  • Over 100 light tactical vehicles;
  • 44 trucks and 88 trailers to transport heavy equipment;
  • 90 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers;
  • 300 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers;
  • 250 M1117 Armored Security Vehicles;
  • 580 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs);
  • Six armored utility trucks;
  • Mine clearing equipment and systems;
  • Over 13,000 grenade launchers and small arms;
  • Over 111,000,000 rounds of small arms ammunition;
  • Over 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets;
  • Approximately 1,800 Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Laser-guided rocket systems;
  • Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • 15 Scan Eagle Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Two radars for Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • Unmanned Coastal Defense Vessels;
  • Over 50 counter-artillery radars;
  • Four counter-mortar radars;
  • 20 multi-mission radars;
  • Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems and equipment;
  • Counter air defense capability;
  • Ten air surveillance radars;
  • Two harpoon coastal defense systems;
  • 58 coastal and riverine patrol boats;
  • M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
  • C-4 explosives, demolition munitions, and demolition equipment for obstacle clearing;
  • Obstacle emplacement equipment;
  • Tactical secure communications systems;
  • Four satellite communications antennas;
  • SATCOM terminals and services;
  • Thousands of night vision devices, surveillance systems, thermal imagery systems, optics, and laser rangefinders;
  • Commercial satellite imagery services;
  • Explosive ordnance disposal equipment and protective gear;
  • Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear protective equipment;
  • 100 armored medical treatment vehicles;
  • Over 350 generators;
  • Medical supplies to include first aid kits, bandages, monitors, and other equipment;
  • Electronic jamming equipment;
  • Field equipment, cold weather gear, and spare parts;
  • Funding for training, maintenance, and sustainment.

The State Department goes on to say that

As of 9 September 2022, nearly 50 Allies and partner countries have provided security assistance to Ukraine. Among their many contributions, Allies and partners have delivered 10 long-range Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 178 long-range artillery systems, nearly 100,000 rounds of long-range artillery ammunition, nearly 250,000 anti-tank munitions, 359 tanks, 629 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), 8,214 short-range air defense missiles, and 88 lethal UAVs.  Since February 24, Allies and partners worldwide have provided or committed over $13 billion in security assistance.

Some may notice that the list doesn’t specify exactly how many ‘Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems’ have been provided, nor does it provide any precise information on the quantity of several other pieces of military equipment (this is still a great improvement in transparency compared to European states, though, who routinely invoke ‘security concerns’ to dismiss questions about the weapons they’re sending to Kiev). We can see that the 31 Abrams tanks, object of much discussion, aren’t in fact the first tanks sent to Ukraine; 41 recycled ex-Soviet T-72Bs had already been sent, along with 1,700 Humvees and 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles (not to mention naval drones).

Faced with this avalanche of armaments, we might ask why nobody is talking about the profits of the defence industry. In the past, arms dealers would have at least been denounced for harvesting the spoils of war. Today, the Financial Times merely complains that US suppliers are reaching the limits of their productive capacities and would struggle to meet demand if another front was to open. An incredible torpor has taken hold of Western public opinion. ‘Peace-washing’ is the foreign-policy hawk’s new pastime: accelerating the war through the ever-increasing provision of weapons is seen as the best way to accelerate peace – because, in the absence of those arms, Russia would supposedly invade the Baltic states, followed by Poland and Finland. Bombs and tanks are seen as essential to curb a dreaded Muscovite imperialism, even though the repeated failure of Russian offensives has undermined any notion of its might, and Russia’s GDP – along with its industrial capacities – remains inferior to that of semi-peripheral countries like Italy.

What seems to have come back into fashion, at least in the US, is the military-Keynesianism Michael Klare has taught us so much about: the revival of the economy through war. But compared to the military-Keynesianism of the 1960s – Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, financed at least in part by the productive boom generated by the Vietnam War – what’s underway today has a more archaic flavour. It evokes the first two years of WWI, those months in which the US officially sat on the fence, furnishing the arsenals of the European powers locked in battle against the central powers (Germany, the Habsburg Empire, and later the Ottoman Empire), and witnessed the evisceration of the planetary supremacy of the British Navy, before intervening once the enemy was practically exhausted (even though earlier involvement may have spared them the Russian Revolution).

Much like today, the US extracted profit from a war fought on a faraway continent (a situation that was to recur with the European and Asian theatres of WWII). Then, as now, there’s something particularly vile – if you’ll permit the term – about the US telling its proxy warriors: we must be united in the defence of democracy and freedom against authoritarianism; we’ll arm you, but you do the dying. Oh, and your country will be pulverised in the process. (‘Armiamoci e partite’ was a popular early twentieth-century riposte to such militarism.)

The similarities don’t stop there. The strongest resemblance between past and present lies in the elite somnambulism bringing us to the brink of world war and nuclear holocaust. I’m referring here to a work – often cited but rarely read – by the Australian historian Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013). The most charitable way to explain Joe Biden’s assertion that sending tanks to Ukraine ‘is not an offensive threat to Russia’, is that he’s become a Clarkian sleepwalker. Either that, or he is just brazenly, criminally reckless. Of course, the function of the media should be to underscore the potential consequences of such actions; but even the most respectable publications are currently engaged in out-hawking one another. On 30 January, Foreign Affairs published what looked like a promising article by Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, entitled ‘How To Get A Breakthrough In Ukraine’. The subtitle, ‘The Case Against Incrementalism’, was even more encouraging. Was this, at last, an argument against escalation from a uniquely cool-headed outlet? Forget it. McFaul’s point was that US should halt the gradual provision of arms and instead unload a massive amount of cutting-edge weaponry on Ukraine in the hope of securing a crushing victory. While conceding that ‘there are risks to providing more and better weapons’, he noted that these were outweighed by the ‘risks of not doing so’.

What are the risks of escalation? Last May, I wrote for Sidecar that

contrary to what common sense would dictate, the stalling of Putin’s military advance has actually undermined the hopes for peace. The Kremlin could never expose itself to Russian public opinion and sit down for talks without having achieved any of its war aims, for that would highlight the failure of its offensive. And NATO, for its part, has no interest in de-escalating the conflict. It will not spare Russia from punishment, either for its atrocities in Bucha or its insubordination before the US hegemon . . . As Russia comes unstuck in Ukraine, its enemies are no longer compelled to negotiate; they therefore become more intransigent and change the negotiating terms, leading Russia to intensify its efforts, and so on. The first victim of this cycle is the Ukrainian people. The outcome of stalling negotiations is the shelling of more cities and the death of more civilians. The West will continue to trumpet its values over their corpses (unless it decides to intervene directly and trigger a nuclear war). To paraphrase an old saying: it’s easy to play the hero when someone else’s neck is on the line.

Compared to the spring of last year, the current situation is infinitely worse. Positions are even more entrenched. For Putin the war has become a matter of life and death, with Russia’s very existence on the line. The proof of this lies in the position taken up by the ECR Group, the conservative bloc in the European Parliament, which claimed in a statement on 31 January that the only possible outcome of the war was Russia’s break-up into different states:

It is naive to think that the Russian Federation can remain within the same constitutional and territorial framework. Taking into account the national and ethnic map of the territories of the Russian Federation, we should discuss the prospects for the creation of free and independent states in the post-Russian space, as well as the prospects for their stability and prosperity.

The more likely this result, the more dangerous the ‘Russian bear’ will become (how expressive are these ancient stereotypes!). The US, meanwhile, is growing increasingly belligerent – not only towards Moscow, but towards Beijing. Let’s not forget that Washington has initiated a de facto technological world war on China – with the head of the US Air Mobility Command, Miki Minihan, predicting an all-out war in 2025.

Numbed by relentless propaganda, public opinion finds itself in a state of political catalepsy. Everyone since Dr Johnson has repeated the axiom that truth is the first casualty of war, but few have stopped to ask which truths are being killed in this war. The Russians have surely been asked to swallow many lies. But what fables have we been told? For months, we heard that the Russians had bombarded a nuclear plant occupied by the Russian army: that is, that they had attacked themselves. It was also suggested that they blew up their own gas pipeline last September. Only the Russians bomb infrastructure and civilians, force young men into battle and censor the realities of war – never our side. Once it was usual to discuss the role of ‘embedded’ correspondents on the frontlines. Now we unflinchingly accept their recruitment, replete with helmets and bulletproof vests.

As I’ll never tire of saying: in war, the law of the excluded middle does not apply. It’s simply not the case that if one side is wrong, the other must be right; the negation of a falsehood is not by definition true. Everyone can be in the wrong, everyone can be lying. NATO’s aggression and expansionism doesn’t turn Putin into an innocent little lamb. And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict. In today’s world, we rely on elites – technocrats, the ‘cognitive aristocracy’ – to pilot us through perilous waters with their superior wisdom. But what does this stratum of decision-makers really know? Judging from the shipwreck they’re heading towards at top speed, the answer is: not much.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘Five Wars in One’, NLR 137.

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Renovation in Bolivia?

The 2020 Bolivian general election marked the return of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party to government after it was deposed by a right-wing coup. Since then, the leftist administration of Luis ‘Lucho’ Arce Catacora has tried to fortify itself against another antidemocratic campaign of destabilization by projecting an image of unity and strength. Yet during Arce’s tenure, the internal components of the MAS have grown increasingly discordant – with each factional dispute amplified by a hostile media. The respective supporters of president Arce, vice-president David Choquehuanca, and former president Evo Morales have each been vying for power, attempting to outmanoeuvre their factional opponents ahead of the 2025 elections. Meanwhile, centrifugal tendencies on the right have become even more pronounced, with different currents blaming one another for the left’s ascendancy. The result is an ongoing process of fragmentation across Bolivia’s two major political blocs, neither of which is capable of articulating a coherent ideological project. The country’s historic fault-lines – separating the cities from the countryside; indigenous masses from non-indigenous elites; the south and the east from the north and the west; the media, universities and middle classes from peasant confederations and workers’ unions; agro-industrial, hydrocarbon and financial capitalists from a burgeoning informal proletariat – no longer find self-evident political articulation in two antipodal camps. Beneath the superficial split between masistas and anti-masistas lies a more complex patchwork of rivalries and power centres.

In many respects, the disunity on both sides can be traced back to the 2019 coup d’état. Morales, who was propelled to power by the revolutionary upheavals of the new millennium, had become Bolivia’s longest-serving president and was constitutionally unable to seek re-election. Yet in 2016 he attempted to override these limits through a series of legal and political manipulations. In February of that year, he held a referendum on whether to amend the constitution to allow him to campaign for a fourth term. When 51% of the electorate voted ‘No’, he ignored the results and ran for the presidency anyway, on the basis of a dubious legal verdict from the country’s highest electoral tribunal. This fiasco became a call to arms among middle-class rebels and regional civic committees bent on ousting the MAS.

Bolivia’s electoral system requires the leading presidential candidate to secure more than 50% of the vote, or more than 40% of the vote plus a margin of 10% over the second-place candidate, to avoid a run-off. On the evening of the general election, in late October 2019, the ‘quick count’ tally showed Morales with 45%, compared to 38% for the centre-right runner-up Carlos Mesa. Then, after an unexplained delay of 22 hours, the updated count indicated Morales enjoying a lead over Mesa in excess of 10 points, obviating the need for a second round. The late shift in votes to Morales’s advantage was plausible given the demographics of the regions where ballots were counted later in the process, but the delay between the two tallies created the impression of foul-play. Though it could not provide any evidence, the entire opposition cried fraud – as did the Organization of American States. Violent protests against Morales erupted across the country, and the far-right of the eastern lowlands, backed by the military and police, launched a soft-coup that forced his resignation. The coup was petit-bourgeois and mestizo in composition, with some plebeian layers drawn into the antimasista hysteria. Its rallying cry was one of pure negation: ‘Fuera Evo’. No positive, alternative agenda was ever advanced by its leaders. Yet there was never any doubt about whose interests they were serving: those of agro-industrial, financial and hydrocarbon capital.

The coup-plotters succeeded in installing Jeanine Áñez, an ultra-conservative Catholic senator from Beni whose party had won only 4% in the previous election. With Morales and his inner-circle exiled to Mexico and Argentina, the obvious task for Áñez was to dismantle the statist elements of the MAS era – such as the quasi nationalization of hydrocarbons – and reverse collective indigenous rights. With the popular classes caught in a momentary stupor, and left-wing forces weakened by years of clientelist integration into the state under Morales, Áñez had the tools for oligarchic restoration at her disposal. Yet her regime was undermined from the start by its own ideological and practical excesses: above all, state repression – 36 assassinated, 80 injured, hundreds detained and exiled – and bureaucratic ineptitude in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had no plan to assemble a viable support base or manage the country’s economic instability. Instead, its stand-out features were brutal state violence, brazen corruption, administrative incompetence and a colossal decline in living standards, as the growth rate plummeted in 2020 and more than 3 million Bolivians became unable to meet their basic nutritional needs. The government also unleashed a new, virulent wave of anti-indigenous racism in civil society, with the dog whistles of state officials providing a soundtrack.   

As such, Áñez rapidly concentrated workers and peasants into a powerful opposition force, while at the same time losing the loyalty of the petit-bourgeois layers that had originally supported the coup. Amid the ongoing economic and health crises, significant parts of the new middle-class – forged during the expansionary period under Morales – were horrified to find themselves returned to proletarian or lumpen status. At the same time, social movements and unions, which were initially slow to respond to the coup, managed to rally their forces, erecting street barricades and disrupting supply chains. By the time the general election of December 2020 rolled around, the golpistas, having failed to prevent the MAS from running, had split into three rival presidential campaigns. Carlos Mesa’s centre-right Citizen Community led the pack, followed in the distance by the right-wing extremist Luis Fernando Camacho, followed by Áñez, who saw the writing on the wall and eventually withdrew from the race.

*

All those who had participated in the disaster of the Áñez administration were duly punished by the electorate. Arce returned the MAS to office with a decisive 55% of the vote, while Mesa obtained a paltry 29%. The MAS won in five of nine departments, with a majority in both houses of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly. Elements of the ‘undecided’ middle class that had shifted right in support of the coup had now swung back behind Arce – who benefited from making the economic crisis the leitmotif of his campaign. He admitted the errors of past MAS administrations, called for a national ‘renovation’ and promised to restore stability. Nostalgia for the bonanza years during the first stretch of Morales’s rule (2006-14) was a fire easily stoked. Arce could point to his relatively orthodox reign as MAS finance minister during an era of high commodity prices, dynamic capitalist accumulation, historic profits in extractive sectors and modest improvements in the livelihood of the urban working class and peasantry. In the end, he performed better throughout the west of the country than Morales did in 2019. Even in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, where Camacho secured 45%, Arce still bested Morales’s previous vote share. Polls had indicated a modest advantage for MAS in the first round, but no one anticipated this resounding victory.

Morales was still abroad during the 2020 ballot, yet he had personally selected Arce as the candidate after David Choquehuanca had been put forward by the grassroots, including the coalition of social movements known as the Unity Pact. Morales only reluctantly agreed to include Choquehuanca on the ticket at the Unity Pact’s insistence, and the MAS campaign slogan – ‘Lucho y David, un solo corazón’ – betrayed some anxiety about the divisions developing within the party. Unlike Choquehuanca, Arce was non-indigenous, had never shown any leadership ambitions, and had no social base of his own, so his ability to fill Morales’s shoes was questionable. Yet the election results made clear that masismo could not be reduced to evismo. His victory showed that it was possible to win without the party’s historic caudillo, while demonstrating the enduring popularity of the MAS’s neodevelopmentalist plurinational model.

Arce was raised in La Paz, the son of teachers, and earned an undergraduate degree at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, specializing in accounting. During his undergraduate years he was briefly affiliated with Socialist Party-One, whose intellectual and political north star, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, had been assassinated by the Luis García Mesa dictatorship in 1980, when Arce was 17 years old. But unlike virtually all other leading figures of the MAS, Arce has no real history of involvement in the politics of indigenous liberation, social movements or trade union struggle. After graduating, he worked at various positions in the Central Bank, taking a brief hiatus to earn a Masters in economics from Warwick University.

Arce became Morales’s first finance minister in 2006 and remained in post for almost the entirety of the Morales era, only stepping aside from 2017 to 2019 to receive treatment for a kidney cancer diagnosis. As Finance Minister, he ran a tight ship, isolating his office from social-movement pressure and adhering rigidly to low inflation targets. Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow at Chatham house, described him as ‘a technocratic, moderate force within the Morales government’ who ‘maintained good relations with the international financial institutions and investors.’ Even in the high-MAS era of 2006-2014, there was never a thoroughgoing transformation of the country’s productive structure, thanks in part to Arce’s caution; yet wealth was distributed to the poorest so long as commodity prices remained high.

Now, two years into Arce’s tenure, how can we characterize his record? The president fulfilled his first policy commitments immediately upon taking office, including cash transfers of $140 per month to roughly a third of the population, a symbolic tax on large domestic fortunes and investigations into the repression of the Áñez regime. Yet, on the whole, his administration is a workaday technocracy, lacking any of the transformative aspirations that the early Morales period kindled among the poor and dispossessed. As sociologist Vladimir Mendoza Manjón has noted, the prevailing view within Arce’s cabinet is that the era of transformation has come to an end. Instead, the current period demands a defensive, administrative posture: at best, the consolidation of previous gains amid more challenging material conditions. The aim is to prioritize political stability and slowly reactivate the project of neodevelopmental capitalist modernization. This is likely to be Arce’s only horizon of possibility in the absence of serious pressure from social movements – whose supporters have been isolated within the government, controlling only the ministries of Education and Rural Culture and Development. Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry remains subject to Arce’s personal oversight. Lower-level functionaries from the Morales era have been elevated, while virtually none of the old guard remains in post. Evistas are entirely absent from Arce’s inner circle. In this sense at least, the promised ‘renovation’ has begun in earnest.

The Pink Tide leader whom Arce most closely resembles is perhaps Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. Although he lacks Correa’s repressive bent when dealing with opponents to his left, Arce’s approach to statecraft is similarly top-down and economistic. It rests on socially-isolated planning, pragmatic concessions to the balance of forces (statically understood), and technical fixes to political problems. Yet Arce governs without anything approximate to Correa’s hegemony at the height of the commodities boom. Bolivia’s commodities downturn began in 2014, driven by a collapse in natural gas prices, and its economy steadily declined until 2019, before contracting dramatically – by 8.7% – in 2020. This crisis was not merely a conjunctural effect of the pandemic; it was also the result of underlying structural problems, including the end of the gas cycle. Gas rents accruing to the state were $3.5 billion in 2013, but just $1.5 billion in 2017. Structural investment problems in the gas sector have persisted from the Morales era to the present, with fiscal and commercial deficits growing in recent years. Foreign reserves reached a peak of $15 billion in 2014, but have been drawn down ever since to finance public spending commitments amid lower state revenue.

The recent dynamics of the world market have had negative consequences for Latin America and the Caribbean – but, for various reasons, Bolivia has so far been an outlier. Regionally, strong inflationary pressures, weak job growth and falling investment predominate. The Russian war on Ukraine has limited the international food supply and driven up energy prices, compounding the problems set in motion by the pandemic and the afterlife of the 2008 financial crash. As a gas exporter, however, Bolivia has benefited from higher prices, temporarily transforming its commercial deficit into a surplus. And because the country continues to produce most of its food domestically, with targeted export controls on select agricultural exports, pressures on food prices have been tempered. Together with a longstanding state subsidy for domestic gas consumption, this helps to explain why Bolivia’s 2022 inflation rate was the lowest in the region: a trend that helps to explain Arce’s relatively strong approval ratings. Over the next decade, the country’s political economy – and ecologically-inflected class struggles – will be shaped by the nascent lithium-mining industry. But as yet this process is only in its infancy, and is unlikely to play a major role in the current administration.

*

Although Arce initially pledged to serve for only one term, now there is every indication he will seek to run again in 2025, as the constitution permits. But Morales, despite having lower approval ratings than both Arce and Choquehuanca, retains a powerful capacity for social mobilization, continues to control the MAS, and is open about his plan to become its candidate in 2025. When he returned from exile in November 2020, hundreds of indigenous supporters poured onto the streets to greet him. The following year, he organized the dramatic Marcha por la Patria: a mobilization that was at once a real defence of the Arce administration against destabilization threats from the opposition, and a signal to the country – including Arce and Choquehuanca – that the former president still wields the kind of social power that is impossible to tabulate in polling data. Álvaro García Linera, who served as vice-president from 2006 to 2019, asserts that Morales remains the indispensable ‘social and political leader’ of the party, while Arce is merely the ‘political and governmental leader’. For García Linera, the MAS project demands that both statesmen triangulate with each other and with the party’s loose federation of social organizations. Between these three elements, he says, ‘there has to be an ensemble of articulations, which are not always easy.’ Out of office, Morales has readopted the militant rhetoric of his early political career; but in policy terms, it is doubtful that a new Morales government would significantly diverge from Arce’s. After all, Morales more or less handed over the economy to Arce for the duration of his time in office, and the present material situation means that implementing any left-populist inclination would be an uphill battle.

Since returning to Bolivia, Morales has worked diligently to recover his lost authority. Overriding local resistance, he has used his position as leader of the MAS to dictate the party’s lists of candidates for municipal mayors and departmental governors in regional elections. In the process, several high-profile figures have been driven out of the party – including Eva Copa, the masista president of the Senate during the Áñez government, and Rolando Cuéllar, former leader of the Eastern Bloc of the party in Santa Cruz. (Copa ran under the Jallalla party banner instead and secured an overwhelming mandate as the new mayor of El Alto.) While trying to avoid the impression of a major split with Arce himself, Morales has openly criticized some of his cabinet ministers and has made cryptic statements about an ostensive right-wing faction within the government, which Morales accuses of planning to marginalize him with the help of elements in the Armed Forces. So far, Arce has ignored such provocations – aware that, although the ex-president retains an active support base, his overall popularity has been considerably diminished. 

Choquehuanca was previously one of Morales’s closest personal confidantes and political loyalists; yet the pair are now bitterly polarized. Following the 2017 referendum defeat, Choquehuanca stressed the need for a new leader of the party – a position only he could fill. When his ambition to replace Morales became clear, he was demoted from the highest to the lowest echelons of the party: relegated from the role of foreign affairs minister to a marginal diplomatic post. Morales also moved against a number of other former allies who had rallied behind Choquehuanca’s leadership bid. Now, Choquehuanca knows that his political career is finished if Morales successfully returns to the presidency. He is desperate to prevent this outcome, whether by rallying ‘renovation’ forces to block Morales’s candidacy, or, more likely, by helping to split the party once Morales has secured the nomination.

Choquehuanca has a galvanized social base in the Aymara altiplano. He played a minor role in the 2020 election campaign, but according to Pablo Stefanoni, one of the keenest observers of Bolivian politics, his occasional interventions were decisive in securing the indigenous base of the MAS and winning back some of those who had become disillusioned with Morales. Choquehuanca is popular among the younger generation of MAS militants, and among intermediary party officials who for one or another reason have been alienated by the Morales-dominated national leadership. Choquehuanca served in Morales’s cabinet for longer than anyone except Arce. Early on, he played the role of anti-intellectual, boasting that he hadn’t read a book in sixteen years when he assumed office as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Ideologically, however, he adapted more or less fully to the pragmatism of the Morales era. If his politics diverge from those of his former boss, it is in his greater underlying sympathy for Aymara nationalism; yet, in electoral terms, this is somewhat of a liability, which restricts the core of his potential base to the western altiplano. It’s unlikely his prospective bid for the presidency will be successful. More plausibly, he may assume the role of subcomandante in any eventual split from the MAS led by Arce.

As the journalist Fernando Molina has written, Bolivian political history is rife with social fragmentation and chaotic conflict – especially following the exit of a major caudillo, when battles to succeed him flare up. The novelty of the present moment is that Morales was coercively excluded from governmental power, yet remains a crucial internal vector who defines the country’s wider sociopolitical coordinates.

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If the MAS is thus internally divided, what of Bolivia’s right-wing opposition? The political scene under Arce is still haunted by the spectres of the 2019 coup. Dozens of ex-military officials have been imprisoned for their role in Morales’s ouster, including the heads of the Armed Forces and police. Áñez was sentenced to ten years in prison – although she was only held accountable for the events of November 2019 and not the state massacres that followed. Marco Pumari, the ex-president of the Civic Committee of the department of Potosí, is in jail awaiting trial, accused of provoking the burning and sacking of the Electoral Tribunal in Potosí in the lead up to the coup. Mesa remains judicially unscathed, although his brand of washed-out centrism has become increasingly unpopular.

Until very recently, Camacho had managed to both avoid legal charges and strengthen his position. He was elected governor of Santa Cruz in March 2021 and became the face of a growing far-right movement, which carries particular political heft in Santa Cruz, Beni, Potosí, and Tarija. A few days after Christmas, however, Camacho was finally arrested for his role in the 2019 coup. He will spend the next few months in prison in La Paz awaiting trial. Arce timed the arrest to quell criticisms from Morales that his administration was lax in its treatment of the right-wing opposition, and to take advantage of incipient fractures within the local cruceño right between traditional lowland conservatism and Camacho radicalism.

In October and November 2022, the far right launched a 36-day ‘civic strike’ over the timing of the next national census, effectively shutting down the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic engine. Several months prior, Arce announced that he would be delaying the census by two years due to technical incapacity. Since the last census of 2012, the populations of the department and city of Santa Cruz had grown rapidly, driven in part by significant migration from the western highlands. As a result, a new census would invariably lead to a substantial eastward shift in state resources and legislative seats. Cruceño protests erupted over the claim that the government’s delay was in fact a veiled power grab, designed to prevent resource and seat alterations that would disadvantage the ruling party in the 2025 elections.

The civic strike was organized by the Inter-Institutional Committee of Santa Cruz. Its three leading figures were Camacho, Rómulo Calvo, president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, and Vicente Cuéllar, rector of the Autonomous University of Gabriel René Moreno. Since the early 2000s, the department of Santa Cruz has been the heart of regional autonomy struggles against centralized state power, mounting consistent challenges to Morales from the right, including strikes, mass gatherings and outbursts of violence. (The ‘civic coup’ attempt of 2008 marked the pinnacle of this trend.) This time around, enforcement of the strike in the predominantly indigenous informal markets of the city was carried out by roving motorcycle gangs armed with machetes and clubs – a signature of Camacho’s right-wing street politics – as well as coordinated assaults and robberies by the proto-fascist Cruceño Youth Union. Petty vendors opposed to the strike mounted resistance where they could, above all in the working-class municipal district of Plan 3000, leading to ferocious nightly clashes that helped weaken the strike toward the end of November. Arce has now agreed to bring the census forward to 23 March 2024, ensuring that the results will be factored into the next election.

The unrest in Santa Cruz revealed the persistent territorialized power of the extreme right in the eastern lowlands and their disquieting capacity for street violence. Yet it also exposed their inability to project national power by uniting with the country’s wider conservative forces or winning support from the state security apparatus. Despite the rhetoric of some on the left, and the deluded fantasies of some on the cruceño right, the civic mobilizations of October and November last year never threatened to develop into another full-scale coup. Business associations in Santa Cruz lent only tepid support as the civic strike wore on and Camacho’s unpredictable street politics became more of a burden than an expression of strength. The ephemeral unity that enabled the overthrow of Morales in 2019 is now a distant memory. Without the figure of Morales to provide focus and clarity, the myriad groupings that made up the golpista coalition immediately fractured, pursuing their separate, parochial priorities. With the arrest of Camacho, the cruceño elite will need to embark on an additional round of recomposition.

Yet, although the right lacks a viable national project, the masistas shouldn’t underestimate their adversaries. Their territorial power bases will allow them to launch more destabilizing actions. They have the support of domestic and international capital, and they control the media and universities. In conditions of stagnation and crisis, from which the MAS cannot easily escape, it would be unwise to assume that the petit bourgeoisie, the police and the military will continue to support the constitutional order. Their loyalties are fickle – and as they change, so will Bolivia.

Read on: Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thompson, ‘The Chequered Rainbow’, NLR 35.

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Highbrow’s Enemy

An enormously promising title, Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation arrives suggesting a tantalizing combination of coming-of-age movie memoir and deep dive into the spectacular films of the 1970s – Hollywood’s last golden age – via a celebrated and accomplished filmmaker with an infectious enthusiasm for the movies and a breathtaking facility with an impossible number of features, renowned and obscure. Tarantino has an encyclopedic knowledge of postwar American film history, often well-deployed in the book, and a keen eye for assessing source material. Most importantly, he understands and is able to convey what made the seventies special – and the eighties dismal: ‘After growing up in the anything-goes seventies, the eighties marked a play-it-safe decade.’ Unlike in the classic studio era, where films were subject to the draconian prohibitions of the Production Code Administration, ‘in the eighties, the restrictions Hollywood imposed on their own product were self-imposed . . . After the seventies, it seemed like film went back to the restraints of the fifties.’ In contrast, Tarantino captures the thrilling, liberating moral ambiguity that defined the New Hollywood, reminding the reader (or explaining to a younger audience raised on a steady diet of Marvel Movies and Message Movies), ‘Complex characters aren’t always sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable.’

Unfortunately, the literary equivalent of driving cross-country with Quentin Tarantino, whose best films include skilled sequences that force viewers to the edge of their seats, turns out to be an unpleasant prospect that few will wish to endure. Admittedly, there were reasons to be wary of climbing into the car in the first place. From a distance, on screen and off, the writer-director can give the impression of a vulgarian, with a taste for numbingly gratuitous, blood-soaked violence, and a serial weakness for that laziest and most irresponsible trope in cinema – the revenge fantasy (a genre invariably celebrated throughout this volume, with numerous entries lovingly referred to as ‘Revengeamatics’).

Such proclivities, however, turn out to be the least of this book’s problems. The Quentin Tarantino of Cinema Speculation comes across as a man of towering ego (the jacket copy describes its author as ‘possibly the most joyously infectious movie-lover alive’), modest insight and questionable taste. The self-regard is overwhelming, even by Hollywood standards. Describing his approach to filmmaking, Tarantino boasts of ‘a fearlessness that comes to me naturally.’ What begins as praise for some very fine directors takes this sudden turn: ‘But they don’t make genre films the way Jean Pierre Melville did. The way I do.’ The only thing missing from that particular reflection is Lloyd Bentsen entering the room to intone, ‘Senator, I knew Jean Pierre Melville.’ It is, regrettably, no surprise to find that the last eight lines of the book are a reminiscence of the moment he won an academy award for a film that was ‘a worldwide smash’ and include six invocations of either ‘me’ or ‘I’.  

Indeed, despite Tarantino’s zeal for the cinema of this era, his prose is a chore to read. The style is exhausting, characterized by an avalanche of obscenities which are presumably intended to seem honest and unbuckled, but which strike the reader as a tiresome affectation. Similarly disfiguring is the endless stream of unmotivated name dropping (‘The comedian Robert Wuhl once told me, “I’ve seen Bullitt four times and I couldn’t tell you what the plot is about’’’), all in the service of confidently expressed, unreflective assertions presented as gospel. This is not writing, it is talking – endless talking, and it is more than a little repetitive, as if the chapters were written individually and never intended to form a coherent whole.

It may be that there is ultimately no daylight between this writer-director of undeniably large talent, his (often-grating) public persona, and the uninterruptable know-it-all loudmouth riffing and sub-referencing revealed in these pages. Absurd as it is to invoke Gore Vidal in this context, a quote of his well describes what the reader will learn – or not learn – about Tarantino from this book: ‘I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.’ Yet I still harbour the suspicion that our narrator is actually more sophisticated than he lets on.

Cinema Speculation features chapters on films from 1968 to 1981 – the glory days of the New Hollywood – interspersed with thematic essays. There is no table of contents – and it is easy to imagine Tarantino explaining why: ‘If you’re gonna read it, who the fuck needs a fucking table of contents? Bruce Willis once told me he skipped over all that crap and just dove into the action of the fucking book.’ This disposition also likely explains the lack of a preface and acknowledgements as well. A summary overview of the chapters is nevertheless informative. The essays include a memoir of young Quentin’s voracious, very early exposure to the New Hollywood revolution, an appreciation of long-serving Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas, and a chapter that promises to express the essence of the enterprise, ‘The New Hollywood in the Seventies’. The movies selected for canonization are Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Deliverance, The Getaway, The Outfit, Sisters, Daisy Miller, Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder, Paradise Alley, Escape from Alcatraz, Hardcore, and The Funhouse.

‘Little Q Watching Big Movies’ provides a guided tour of some of the films that Tarantino saw at too young an age:  ‘In that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit.’ That shit included M*A*S*H, whose seven-year-old viewer especially enjoyed the scene with Radar ‘placing the microphone under the bed as Hot Lips and Frank Burns fucked.’ More generally, he recalls, ‘some of those adult movies were fucking amazing!’ Two things emerge from this opening chapter. One is that Big Q is not much different from Little Q, who protested to his mother that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shouldn’t have ended in a freeze frame, but instead shown the protagonists shredded to bloody ribbons. Why suggest, when you can show? ‘Despite how iconic that image has become, I still agree with me, “They should have shown it.’’ ’ Less is not more, more is more, and even more, especially if it’s blood-soaked, is even more still. The child is indeed the father of the man.

The second motif established early in the book is Tarantino’s idiosyncratic taste, expressed with little regard for logical consistency from one pronouncement to the next. He prefers, for example, the Roger Vadim clunker All the Pretty Maids in a Row – a mildly amusing curiosity at best – to John Boorman’s seminal Point Blank, which is waved off as a ‘nonentity crime film’. Ironically, All the Pretty Maids to its discredit looks like it was shot in the style of a made-for-TV movie, and is littered with small screen players – two condemnations that Tarantino erroneously hurls at Point Blank in his summary dismissal of that masterpiece. 

The ode to Kevin Thomas, a critic at the Times since 1962 who shares Tarantino’s taste for grindhouse cinema (and who has an uncommon reverence for the directing chops of breastsploitation maestro Russ Meyer), is an odd interregnum in Cinema Speculation’s narrative flow. Here the author pauses, often at length, to dump on critics he dislikes and to gripe a bit about some negative reviews. A highlight of this discussion is that it features the only potentially self-aware sentence in the entire book: when their tastes diverged, if was often due to the fact that ‘Thomas had a real distaste for mean-spirited violence.’ Speaking of a critic who gave a rave review to the generally reviled, blood-soaked Supervixens, Tarantino observes, ‘Is my taste in cinema more bloodthirsty than Kevin Thomas’? Clearly.’

‘The New Hollywood in the Seventies’ is particularly disappointing, as the title suggests it should get to the heart of what this book is all about. Instead, it is a slim and hurried rehash of material that seems scraped from Peter Biskind’s well-worn Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) and a handful of other studies name checked along the way, including James Monaco’s superb American Film Now (1979). (And probably others – you didn’t think this book would have a fucking bibliography did you?) Rather than articulating a distinct perspective, the chapter is not much more than a list of names and films – almost everybody gets their sentence. Surprisingly, Tarantino occasionally loses his bearings on what should be home turf, as when he lumps Peter Bogdanovich’s relentlessly downbeat The Last Picture Show (shot in black and white, then commercial poison) with The Sting and Star Wars – all of them dismissed as ‘cut for maximum audience enjoyment.’ Yet in what could be charitably described as something of a paradox, a few chapters later Tarantino reminds readers that Rocky is probably his all-time favorite film (though soon after he rates Rocky II even higher). It is hard to imagine a movie more purposefully, relentlessly and transparently designed to make its audience feel good. Don’t take it from me, take it from Tarantino: he ‘never . . . repeat never’ heard an audience cheer with such exuberance in a movie theater.

Of course, ‘feel good’ needs to be calibrated to taste: ‘The closest I came to an audience cheering like we did in Rocky was George Kennedy and William Devane blowing the fuck out of the killers that murdered their families.’ It is also more than passing strange that someone who incisively castigated eighties films for playing it safe would champion a movie that plays it safer than any film in the history of cinema. In any event, Stallone’s average-lug-beats-the-odds-and-gets-the-girl flick is, to say the least, an odd choice to represent the pinnacle ‘of a time when movies were fucking incredible.’ A throwback to simple times, simple stories, and pandering, spoon-fed finales, Rocky would have been just another boxing picture among many in the 1930s. Whereas for Tarantino, ‘Everything about Rocky took audiences by complete surprise.’ Another theory is that, at age thirteen, it took him by surprise.

The movie chapters are a little better – or at least more distinct – but collectively they amount to something less than a mixed bag. Things get off to an unpromising start with Bullitt, fifteen pages that are essentially a mash note to Steve McQueen, with nary a glimmer of insight into this rich and multifaceted film. The treatment of Dirty Harry, in contrast, is a pleasant surprise. In the best and most thoughtful chapter in the book, Tarantino shines, contextualizing the film in the context of director Don Siegel’s long career, and engages with uncharacteristic nuance in the debate surrounding the film’s problematic politics. Even here, though, the tendency to speak in breathless soundbites (‘If Dirty Harry were a boxer it would be Mike Tyson in his knockout prime’) derails the momentum of sustained analysis. Still, if every chapter in Cinema Speculation flashed the strengths of this one, it would be worth pushing through all the braggadocio and monologuing.

Perhaps the biggest bust in this volume is its treatment of The Getaway. A still from that production graces the cover, featuring the filmmaker’s favorites Sam Peckinpah and McQueen, so presumably Tarantino would have something to say about this one. Instead we are treated to twenty-five pages of not very much. Our raconteur picks apart a few holes in the plot, and tells us that ‘I asked Peter [Bogdanovich] what he thought about [the] novel.’ Observations about the movie, however, are limited to tossed-off remarks such as ‘It’s my feeling that Ali McGraw’s moment to moment work in this film is essential’ and ‘I used to like the ending more than I do now.’ The Getaway is no masterpiece, but it is a film worth talking about, and even taking seriously. Christina Newland, in a thoughtful, engaging and enthusiastic essay for Little White Lies, says more in a thousand words than Tarantino offers here.

Sisters provides the opportunity for an appreciation of the early films of Brian de Palma, and its long discussion of Taxi Driver knows enough to ask a key question: is this a movie about a racist or is it a racist movie? Unfortunately, yet again, over thirty pages there is not a single moment of critical acumen (nor any appreciation of the filmmaking). Instead, now too recognizably on brand, serious engagement with one of the landmarks of the New Hollywood is eschewed in favour of here’s-what-I-think-off-the-top-of-my-head. There is a time and place for such things – check out Tarantino’s brilliant revisionist interpretation (in character) of Top Gun from the 1994 movie Sleep with Me – but this isn’t it. Cinema Speculation gives the impression that any hint of visual analysis or even appreciation would fall under the category of highbrow – which, to Tarantino, is the ultimate obscenity. According to the index (yes, the book has a fucking index, probably to help people look themselves up), Alfred Hitchcock appears over twenty-five times in the text. Yet there is no engagement with the marvellous Hitchcockian flourishes that characterize some of Taxi Driver’s finest scenes. Instead, the discussion is limited to observations like ‘Travis was a fucking loon,’ and ‘no fucking way was Travis in Vietnam’ (um, okay, if you say so); and a report of the audience reaction at a favorite grindhouse cinema: ‘I dug it, they dug it, and as an audience, we dug it.’ Say what you will about these comments, but they are definitely not highbrow.

Quentin Tarantino is an accomplished filmmaker, and, necessarily, a capable artisan. One could not tell that from this book, which reads like a movie geek perhaps terrified at being seen as a movie nerd. This likely accounts for some of the odd gaps in the narrative, which runs away screaming from anything that might be remotely characterized as thoughtful. Robert Altman, whose many seventies landmarks include McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville, is barely noted, invoked primarily as the target of ad hominem broadsides; Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View) goes unmentioned; Woody Allen’s output is reduced to a few words of high praise for the ‘early funny ones’. This list could easily be elaborated, but these examples raise a larger, more general concern.

Cinema Speculation presents itself as a celebration of ‘the most challenging movies of the greatest movie making era in the history of Hollywood.’ A sentiment that I (and many others) share. What is, finally, most bizarre about its baker’s dozen of features is not so much the idiosyncratic films included, but those that are left out. In trying to make the case that the seventies were indeed a golden age, it is unlikely that this set of movies would convince anybody of anything (although Taxi Driver soars, and you could argue the case for a couple of the others). Even Tarantino isn’t sold on some of them, largely deploying Hardcore as a vehicle to trash Paul Schrader (this is a book that pauses to settle numerous scores), and noting ‘Nothing that deep happens in Paradise Alley. It’s all surface.’ As for Fun House, Tarantino rates Hell Night from the same year as ‘far superior’. I haven’t seen Hell Night, which concerns a fraternity hazing ritual wherein four pledges are dropped off at an (apparently) abandoned mansion, but Roger Ebert’s one-star review plausibly describes it as ‘a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie.’ 

Maybe for some Hell Night is a towering achievement of the New Hollywood era, but while reading page after page about low-budget slasher flicks of modest repute, it is hard not to think of fifty treasures from that extraordinary decade left on the cutting room floor. Of course, much of this may simply boil down to questions of taste. In my view, Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the landmarks of the seventies film – among its enormous strengths: razor-sharp dialogue, bravura location work, and the contributions of the players, including, arguably, Robert Mitchum’s greatest performance. Yates’s Mother, Juggs, & Speed, by contrast, is an unmotivated, incoherent mess, an embarrassment to its distinguished cast, and littered with car crashes about once a reel as if fearful the audience would otherwise nod off (or walk out). In Tarantino’s assessment, Eddie Coyle is ‘overrated’ and Juggs ‘underrated.’ For those who share that view, Cinema Speculation might be a book worth reading.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, Hollywood’s New Wave’, NLR 121

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Green Empire?

In its conviction that the climate crisis ‘changes everything’, and in its search for a historical agent capable of coupling deliverance from catastrophe with radical social transformation, left climate politics is often sustained by a residual optimism. Yet this mood is far from universal. Some commentators have suggested that, given the shortage of time and the dim prospects for seizing state power, climate saviours will have to be drawn from enemy ranks. Take Michael Klare. A longtime peace studies scholar and defence correspondent for The Nation, he is now a cheerleader for the eco-conscious vanguard forming within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). ‘As global temperatures soar and vital resources dwindle’, Klare writes, the climate-mitigation efforts of the DoD have become ‘a model for the rest of society to emulate’. Not only that; the Pentagon’s outlook on global climate politics should be seen as ‘the starting point for America’s future foreign relations’. Has it really come to this? It may be true that, in the absence of a powerful socialist-environmentalist movement, the best hope for humanity is decarbonization from above. But what role is the American imperial apparatus likely to play in this process? Can it plausibly claim to be a ‘climate leader’?

This is the question Neta Crawford takes up in The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: The Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions, published last October. Crawford was recently appointed to Oxford’s top international relations professorship, previously held by League of Nations architect Alfred Zimmern and world-order theorist Hedley Bull. As an undergraduate at Brown in the 1980s, she studied a degree of her own design, ‘The War System and Alternatives to Militarism’, while working with E.P. Thompson and Joan Scott in the peace movement. At the same time, Crawford undertook exhaustive research on Soviet materiel as part of an Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies project to compile a database of all ‘major weapons’ manufactured globally in the post-war period. Within two years of graduating, she had authored a volume which runs to more than a thousand pages, documenting the quantitative minutiae of Soviet military aircraft.

This mastery of military data would inform Crawford’s later work. Since 2011 she has served as co-director of the Costs of War project, counting the human and economic toll of Washington’s war on terror. (At its last major count, the project estimated nearly one million people killed at a cost of over $8 trillion.) Crawford is also highly regarded as an IR theorist. In her first book, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention (2002), she made the case that normative beliefs are a structuring force in world politics, and that persuasive ethical arguments can therefore effect historical change. A decade later, in Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (2013), Crawford turned her attention to the US military, charting its gradual institutionalization of a regime of non-combatant protection, yet highlighting its enduring disregard for civilian harm ‘when military necessity is understood to be high’. This intellectual background has made her especially well-placed to anatomize the climate machinations of the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War is neatly divided into four sections, starting with an impressive account of the American military’s energy history. Citing an 1855 report by the US Secretary of the Navy which stated that the ‘increase in the number of steam-ships will make further purchase of coal necessary’, Crawford unfolds the argument that the US military was a significant driver of the widespread adoption of coal followed by oil. Fossil fuel, she explains, rapidly became the energetic basis of its force posture in the mid-nineteenth century. This led to a consensus among the political and military establishment that access to coal and oil supplies was a vital strategic interest, and protecting them an overriding military objective. As David Petraeus asserted in 2011, ‘Energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities’ – a claim that Crawford verifies by tracking the century-long arc from coal-fired US victory in the Spanish–American war to the establishment of Central Command (CENTCOM) as the lynchpin of Washington’s dominance in the Persian Gulf.

In this account, the carbonization of imperial power – gunboats combusting coal before fighter jets guzzled oil – imbued American expansion with a cyclical logic, ‘where the need for refuelling to expand and protect US interests required bases over ever-larger portions of the globe, while the bases and the fuel themselves became strategic interests.’ Crawford calls this ‘the deep cycle’: a spiralling process of ‘oil demand, consumption, militarization and conflict’. In her reading, it is most notably the beliefs of military planners and foreign policy elites about coal and oil’s centrality that helped institutionalize fossil fuel demand: ‘Institutions were constructed over the last two centuries to realize decision makers’ beliefs about the role of fossil fuels in war.’ By foregrounding the ideational dimension of historical change, Crawford makes the case that fossil fuel dependence was not inevitable; it was rather a contingent choice that could yet be overturned. As she wrote in her first book, focusing on the force of argument might ‘allow us to see room for human agency within the operations of seemingly inexorable political and economic forces.’

In the next section, Crawford considers the question of climate science and US military emissions, demonstrating that the DoD has been aware of the significance of carbon emissions since the late 1950s. Navy-funded research had determined that CO2 molecules dissolved into the ocean after fewer than ten years in the atmosphere, providing the impetus for systematic measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels. The CIA kept a watchful eye on these studies, as did the White House. Nixon’s urban affairs adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, outlined his concerns about ‘the carbon dioxide problem’ in a 1969 memo sent to the president’s chief of staff, warning that the next century could be marked by catastrophic sea level rises: ‘Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter. We have no data on Seattle.’ This was something ‘that the Administration ought to get involved with’, Moynihan counselled, adding that it was ‘a natural for NATO.’

Using documents from Georgetown’s National Security Archive, declassified through freedom of information requests, Crawford goes on to explain how the Pentagon successfully lobbied for the exemption of the bulk of military emissions from the Kyoto Protocol, having convinced the Clinton White House that ‘imposing greenhouse gas emissions limitations on tactical and strategic military systems would . . . adversely impact operations and readiness.’ The legacy of this American diplomatic triumph is that in IPCC accounting, whose conventions are followed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ‘emissions from [military] activity at overseas bases and multilateral operations are excluded from national totals.’

In an effort to redress this wilful oversight, Crawford spends more than fifty pages setting out her own meticulous calculations of US military and military-industrial emissions. Her conclusion is unsurprising: that military emissions track conflict and have declined overall since the end of the Vietnam War, though they remain gargantuan. On her count, US military greenhouse gas emissions stood at just over 109 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMTCO2e) in 1975. By 2020, they had declined to 52 MMTCO2e. Energy consumed by DoD facilities has decreased by a similar magnitude over the same period, thanks to the closure of more than a thousand bases since 1991. Though direct Pentagon emissions are a very small component of the US national total (which stood at 5,222 MMTCO2e in 2020), military industrial emissions accounted for around 17% of total greenhouse emissions from industrial manufacturing in 2019, according to Crawford’s conservative estimate. 

A major polluter whose force is used to ‘protect access to Middle East oil’, the Pentagon has nevertheless devoted more thought to climate change and its consequences than most state institutions. Crawford follows this development in part three of the book, showing how the DoD has been at the forefront of conceiving climate breakdown as a major threat to American national security. What began in the 1990s with concern about battlefield efficiency and the link between environmental degradation and conflict gradually hardened over fifteen years into panic about the implications of ecological breakdown for American power. A series of military-linked reports were released in 2006-7, arguing that climate change ‘acts as a threat multiplier for instability’ which would ‘require the United States to support policies that insulate it as well as countries of strategic concern from the most severe effects’. This emergent consensus was evident in the DoD’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, which stated that ‘the Department is developing policies and plans to manage the effects of climate change on its operating environment, missions, and facilities.’ By 2019, a group of fifty-eight self-described ‘senior military and national security leaders’, led by John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, were pushing back against Trump’s attempt to use his National Security Council to subvert Pentagon and CIA climate change research programmes, writing in a letter to the president: ‘We support the science-driven patriots in our national security community who have rightly seen addressing climate change as a threat reduction issue, not a political one, since 1989.’

Crawford is broadly impressed by the Pentagon’s adaptation efforts. Yet she is also disturbed – and puzzled – by its failure to take climate mitigation more seriously or to recognize its own carbon footprint as a problem. Why are ‘some of the smartest, best-trained, and most determined people on this planet, given the resources of the richest nation on earth’ – long aware of anthropogenic warming and seeking to climate-proof their installations – so ‘strategically inflexible and blind’? For one thing, DoD leaders are surely right (on their own terms) to worry that stringent curbs on their emissions would begin to undercut American military pre-eminence. Greener equipment and weaponry can in some contexts be necessary for tactical and protective reasons, as US forces in Iraq learnt from the vulnerability of their fuel convoys to insurgent attacks. But as Crawford notes, the best that has been managed to date is the Navy running warships on a 10% beef fat, 90% petroleum mix as part of the ‘Great Green Fleet’ gimmick in 2009. It is hard, then, to envisage the Pentagon’s operations being more thoroughly decarbonized without a dramatic retrenchment. Cutting military emissions by massively downscaling the DoD’s size and operations – closing one-fifth of bases and installations, withdrawing from the Persian Gulf – is what Crawford proposes. But there is no mystery as to why the Pentagon would refuse to accept this. Generals are naturally reluctant to opt for their own liquidation. Indeed, even if the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were to wield their power to accelerate decarbonization globally, they would struggle to build an eco-military. Unless the Pentagon can rapidly learn how to rule the skies and patrol the South China Sea propelled by biofuels rather than oil, a reconfiguration of American empire is more likely to take the form of green capital adjoined to a carbon military.

Reviewing The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, Erin Sikorsky cast aspersions on Crawford’s argument that ‘the military is more than just one entity among many that have created the systemic climate risks facing the world today’, querying the assumption that ‘the key to US decarbonization is demilitarization’. This objection is to be expected from Sikorsky – once a CIA officer, now the director of two leading military-linked climate security institutions. Yet perhaps there is a grain of truth in her criticism. For all the strengths of Crawford’s study, its fixation on military emissions can be inhibiting. Given the Pentagon’s emissions make up only around 1% of the US national total, the author’s suggestion – in the final part of the book – that the military could ‘play a major role’ in broader climate mitigation efforts by reducing its carbon footprint seems dubious.

More importantly, Crawford’s painstaking focus on quantifying the DoD’s emissions fails to capture the fundamental purpose of such energy expenditure. In excavating the American military’s energetic foundations since the nineteenth century, Crawford has, to be sure, provided us with an invaluable historical understanding of the relationship between climate change and US imperial firepower. Her concept of ‘the deep cycle’ illuminates the catalytic effects of war and the military industry on the general growth of emissions. Yet, given the specific form American power has taken since the second world war – a global empire of capital – the significant thing about military emissions is not so much their magnitude as the reason they are generated in the first place: namely, the Pentagon’s need to maintain unparalleled supremacy in order to underwrite a much wider, ecologically ruinous regime of accumulation. Washington’s role as guardian of global capital – and the military’s role as coercive guarantor of that position – is conterminous with what environmental historians call ‘the great acceleration’. The advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ and the spread of American-led transnational capitalism are intertwined. As such, the Pentagon’s deadly atmospheric legacy far outstrips the effect of its own emissions.

Crawford’s intellectual project is perhaps best understood as a progressive immanent critique of American empire, defined by intricate attention to the military as an institution – its political history, energy composition, ideologies, procedures, rules, and modes of killing. This kind of granular attention to military politics is vanishingly rare for contemporary scholars of the left, yet both its brilliance and its limitations derive from this immanent position. It is only by seeing the Pentagon as if from the inside that Crawford can produce such rich studies of its machinations. But taking the institution on its own terms can also weaken her critical perspective. In Accountability for Killing, she writes that

the US military has acted as an imperfect moral agent, and its gradual recognition of the problem of collateral damage, its initial ad hoc responses to the problem, and the gradual institutionalization of a program of civilian casualty mitigation illustrates a cycle of moral agency and a process of organizational learning. I argue that this process has been, with exceptions, mostly positive. But I also show where and how the US military could further act to reduce systemic and proportionality/double effect collateral damage.

Here, as with her suggestion that the potential for carbon and methane release caused by airstrikes should be incorporated as a consideration in targeting guidance, Crawford ends up missing the wood for the trees by focusing on – and overplaying – the Pentagon’s potential for ethical self-improvement. So too in some of her 2003-4 articles on the Bush administration, which describe the ‘best intentions’ of Washington policymakers and lament the military’s ‘unfortunate lapses’ in continually bombarding civilians. Crawford’s technocratic prescriptions are premised on a conviction that the practices of the US military, and indeed the empire more widely, are driven by normative beliefs which might be subject to change through ethical persuasion. Considering the ‘moral duties of American hegemony’ in a piece for the house journal of the US Navy, she insists that Washington ‘can in fact pursue a moral policy in Iraq and the rest of the world’, pointing to ‘the integration of ethical reasoning with prudence’ as the best path forward for its foreign policy.

This framework stems from Crawford’s first book, which recast the history of decolonization as a grand teleology of ethical argument: ‘if the roots of decolonization are in the demise of . . . slavery and forced labor, and the cause of abolition was changing normative beliefs through ethical argument, then ethical arguments are a powerful underlying cause of decolonization.’ There is an important continuity of method between this study and Crawford’s work on US empire: the Pentagon’s failure to take climate mitigation seriously is likewise attributed to ‘habits of mind’. The author’s stress on the determinant force of ethical argument, revolutions in normative beliefs and their subsequent institutionalization, helps to explain her moments of credulity about the extent to which the Pentagon can be reformed.

Green empire seems like an idea whose time has come in the West: NATO’s new security concept says it ‘should become the leading international organization when it comes to understanding and adapting to the impact of climate change on security’, while the European Greens promote retrofitting with the slogan ‘Isolate Putin. Insulate Homes.’ Crawford’s empirically rich work does much to deepen our understanding of this trend and its prehistory. But when her anatomy of the military is affixed to an analysis of the empire it shields, the strictures of the Pentagon’s role as a climate actor become clear. With the left in purgatory, it is understandable that scholars like Michael Klare should hope for Washington to take up the mantle of planetary rescue. The notion that there might be anything ethically palatable in a green American empire, though, is a delusion that must be dispensed with.

Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Painting Nationalism Green’, NLR 124.

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Libya’s New Order

For years, whenever I would come to Tripoli, fighting was either raging or the next round was looming on the horizon. An internationally recognised but powerless government in Tripoli would look on as armed groups clashed over influence in the capital, and as the warlord Khalifa Haftar extended his power over eastern, central and southern Libya, often by extraordinarily violent means. Yet, on a visit last November, the atmosphere had changed. The country remained split between rival administrations, with competing foreign powers carving out their spheres of influence. But at a deeper level, the struggles of the past decade seemed to have reached maturity. Oil supplies and revenues were now flowing across political dividing lines. And out of a multitude of factions, a cast of victorious militia leaders, war profiteers and corrupt politicians had begun to emerge: the makings of a future ruling class.

The creation of this new elite has been both the cumulative result of countless acts of violence and an unintended consequence of failed peace-making efforts under the UN’s aegis. Yet the most immediate catalyst for the calm in Tripoli this winter was the clashes back in summer 2022. Tensions between two opposing coalitions of militias had been building up for months, driven by a power struggle between two competing central governments. The acting administration in Tripoli, led by the Qadhafi regime crony Abdelhamid Dabeiba, had taken office as the UN-backed Government of National Unity (GNU) in March 2021. But soon enough the façade of unity crumbled. Elections planned for the following December were cancelled as the leading presidential candidates – including Khalifa Haftar – contested each other’s right to run. Haftar eventually threw his weight behind his former opponent Fathi Bashagha, who was mandated by parts of the east-based parliament to form a new government in February 2022. But Dabeiba, contesting the legality of Bashagha’s government, refused to cede power. Throughout the spring of last year, the two prime ministers vied for the backing of armed groups in the greater Tripoli area, with promises of positions and payments.

The showdown finally came in August, when two Tripoli militias pre-emptively moved against rival groups whom they suspected of plotting to install Bashagha. One of the militias, known as the Stability Support Apparatus, led by Abdelghani al-Kikli, had initially supported Bashagha, but became his fiercest opponent after he ignored Kikli’s wishes in his pick of interior minister. The other, a powerful Salafist outfit that calls itself the Deterrence Apparatus, had so far kept its position in the power struggle opaque. But its links to the Nawasi Brigade, a militia that had become Bashagha’s strongest champion in Tripoli, led many to believe that it would ultimately line up behind Bashagha. A businessman with close ties to Nawasi’s leaders told me that ‘Nawasi were sure the Deterrence Apparatus had their back – until the last minute.’

On 27 August, the Deterrence Apparatus suddenly took over Nawasi’s bases, while Kikli launched attacks on other forces allegedly colluding with Bashagha. A handful of drone strikes – widely believed to have been carried out by Turkey, which has maintained a military presence in western Libya since the 2019-20 civil war – then stopped pro-Bashagha groups on Tripoli’s outskirts from bailing out their embattled allies. The day ended with Nawasi and several smaller armed groups being driven out of Tripoli, as much of the city fell under the control of only two militias: the Deterrence Apparatus and Kikli’s Stability Support Apparatus. The former now holds the capital’s only functioning airport and port, as well as the districts hosting the key government institutions. Kikli controls part of central Tripoli and vast swathes of the city’s south, including its most populous neighbourhood.

Some might dismiss this episode as yet another skirmish in an interminable conflict between the shifting armed alliances in Tripoli. And so it may be. But there is also a broader trend at work here. Over the years, these repeated confrontations have entrenched the power of several fearsome militias, which have become increasingly professionalized while gradually expanding their territory. Post-Qadhafi Libya offered exceptionally favourable conditions for such groups, most of which operate as official security forces and enjoy generous state funding. At first, these organizations were unruly, fractious and unambitious – prone to splits and petty internal rivalries. Yet over time they have developed centralized leadership structures and absorbed growing numbers of the former regime’s military and intelligence officers. The result has been the consolidation of a militia landscape that, in Tripoli alone, initially involved dozens of different armed groups.

Consolidation in Tripoli was preceded by the expansion of Haftar’s military campaign. Haftar started out in 2014 with a motley alliance of armed groups, but with robust foreign support – from Egypt, France, the UAE and Russia – he gradually built up forces of his own. His Libyan Arab Armed Forces are essentially a family business, with the strongest units run by his sons and in-laws, and financed by various illicit activities which the Haftar clan has successfully monopolized.

Perhaps the clearest sign that western Libyan militias are now also coming of age is the openly political part they have begun to play. Until the formation of the Dabeiba government, armed groups mostly contented themselves with exerting political influence behind the scenes. They left it to politicians to sit at the negotiating table, then strong-armed the newly designated top officials into appointing ministers of their choosing. Allies and clients of armed groups came to operate at all levels of the administration, forming entrenched patronage networks.

As they were courted by Dabeiba and Bashagha, however, western Libyan militia leaders assumed an entirely different role. They began meeting with Haftar’s sons, Saddam and Belgasem, to negotiate the terms of a Bashagha takeover or a Dabeiba incumbency. Participants in these meetings told me of their detailed discussions with Belgasem Haftar in May 2022, on a constitutional framework for elections to resolve the impasse between the two governments. Several similar meetings have taken place since – and though they have not produced any deal, they reflect the country’s overall political trajectory. Previously, few militia leaders had sufficiently centralized control over their groups to enter into controversial negotiations without facing internal challenges. Now, they are powerful enough to talk with long-reviled adversaries.

*

Twelve years after the 2011 uprising against Qadhafi, Libya’s revolution has long eaten its own. The initial revolutionary fervour having faded into a distant memory, holdovers from the ancien régime have made a comeback by allying with the newer gun-toting parvenus – a process epitomized by Dabeiba’s appointment as prime minister. (Towards the end of the Qadhafi era, Dabeiba had acquired spectacular wealth at the head of a public-sector construction company).

Over the last decade, this ruling-class-in-waiting – comprised of state officials, businessmen and militia leaders – have become experts at illicit enrichment. Drug smuggling and trafficking or detaining Europe-bound migrants are lucrative practices. Yet these pale in comparison to the benefits of defrauding the state itself. Militias in control of the energy infrastructure – most importantly Haftar, whose forces hold most oil fields and ports – have repeatedly shut down exports to extort large sums from the Tripoli government. More often, however, oil revenues have poured into the Central Bank in Tripoli, propping up an economy that is almost wholly dependent on them (Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa). The Libyan state currently employs more than two-thirds of the country’s working-age population. State purchases constitute a major market – medicine, vehicles, catering and construction contracts – which creates endless embezzlement opportunities for those who can move the administrative levers. The result has been pillage on a vast scale and the decay of public services.

Much of the proceeds from these transactions presumably make their way to bank accounts abroad. But Libya’s war profiteers are increasingly turning their new wealth into tangible assets in the country, preparing to reinvest their capital beyond the conflict’s current phase. Some do so overtly, but many use proxies – both to reduce their exposure and to build patronage networks. Real estate is the most popular target. In Tripoli, relatives of prime minister Dabeiba are using surrogates to buy up properties in the upscale Hay al-Andalus district, according to local residents. In the coastal cities of Zawiya and Sabratha, militia leaders own beach resorts, cafés and private clinics, among other assets. And in Benghazi, commanders in Haftar’s forces have accumulated properties, partly by seizing the homes of alleged ‘terrorists’ whom they forcibly displaced.

A new shopping centre in the city is officially owned by a businessman who is widely reputed to have made his money through drug smuggling and has close ties to Haftar’s son Saddam. (Last autumn, he published videos showing him buying a hunting falcon at the record price of $1m, shooting in the air to celebrate his acquisition, then giving the bird to Saddam as a gift.) Saddam himself informally controls a private bank headquartered in Benghazi, which he has used to finance a new private airline, Berniq Airways. Its equivalent in western Libya is Medsky, launched in 2022 by Mohamed Taher Issa, a businessman from Misrata who rose to prominence by benefiting from privileged access to foreign currency at the official exchange rate during  the worst years of the 2010s economic crisis.

Acquiring and protecting such assets requires influence over state bodies and, to varying degrees, the ability to wield coercion. Firepower also serves as a deterrent against potential prosecution. As such, these investments not only reflect the confidence of Libya’s new rulers; they are also helping to cement a security landscape that is fragmented into militia fiefdoms.

*

Libya’s vicious new order is emerging amidst a stalemate rather than a settlement. During the 2019-20 war over Tripoli, the opposing powers invited foreign actors into the country, whose presence has generally prevented major outbreaks of fighting since Haftar’s defeat. Turkey, which supported the Tripoli government against Haftar, has established military bases in western Libya, and is therefore able to deter Haftar while using its drones to effectively determine which western Libyan faction rules in Tripoli. Meanwhile, Russia’s Wagner Group, which fought for Haftar, mans a string of bases that run through Libya from Sirte on the coast to the far south.

The current geopolitical conjuncture is unfavourable to a resumption of civil war. During Haftar’s Tripoli offensive, Haftar’s Emirati and Egyptian backers had waged a proxy war against their regional rivals Turkey and Qatar. But since the conflict ended, both Turkey and Qatar have mended ties with their regional adversaries. At present, Haftar can count on neither Emirati drones nor petrodollars to start a new war, while Egypt remains heavily indebted. Wagner withdrew parts of its modest contingent from Libya following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and Russia remains too bogged down to support a new offensive. Turkey is similarly unwilling to enter into a direct confrontation, since this would jeopardize cooperation with Russia on other vital issues. This constellation of priorities and allegiances is undoubtedly subject to change – but, for the time being, ambitious Libyan warlords have their hands tied.

Political pathways out of the stalemate are equally blocked. Successive international plans to negotiate transitional unity governments and pave the way for elections produced administrations that were hijacked by small cliques and determined to stay in power indefinitely. Since the latest attempt to hold a vote failed in 2021, Western governments and the UN have reiterated that elections are the only way out of the crisis. Privately, though, many Western diplomats admit that they do not believe a vote will take place anytime soon.

The obstacles to elections are formidable. Key Libyan and foreign players – Haftar, Egypt, France – insist on introducing a presidential system. But like other leading candidates, Haftar only wants presidential elections if he can skew their legal framework in his favour, excluding the most popular competitors. Ultimately, no Libyan faction wants to risk a hostile president monopolizing executive authority. And even parliamentary elections require the adoption of new laws by the two competing legislative bodies, whose majorities have so far colluded to shoot down any proposals so that they can hold on to their seats.

While international diplomats spend their time debating their preferred solutions in an endless series of meetings, Libya’s nascent elite is creating a new reality on the ground. Ironically, foreign diplomacy has contributed to what could be the centrepiece of a future settlement among warlords, as opposed to a roadmap for fair elections. UN and US diplomats repeatedly pressed Dabeiba to transfer funds for salaries to Haftar’s forces, even as the latter refused to provide information on the recipients. Dabeiba’s government now makes these payments on a monthly basis as a matter of course. Another arrangement has linked Dabeiba and Haftar since the summer of 2022, when Dabeiba appointed a Haftar nominee as head of Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) in exchange for Haftar lifting his partial blockade of oil exports. That post has proved all the more important since the Tripoli authorities last year allocated an ‘exceptional budget’ of $7bn to NOC.

Such agreements do not yet add up to a settlement. Haftar, who has long wanted it all, still wants more – far more than Dabeiba can give him without antagonizing western Libyan armed groups. Haftar continues to use the Bashagha government’s existence to exert pressure on Dabeiba, and open up parallel financing mechanisms by forcing banks based in eastern Libya to accumulate debts. A corollary of this tactic is the entrenchment of institutional division between east and west.

Thus, it remains to be seen whether Libyans are witnessing the contours of a future arrangement between a new oligarchy, or the prelude to a separatist conflict once Haftar, who turns eighty this year, is no longer on the scene. Haftar has built his coalition on the promise of seizing absolute power, and he is currently seeking to prevent the rise of secessionist sentiments in the east. It is unclear whether his sons could retain control after his death – or even if they would stick together. In western Libya, too, further turbulence is likely – indeed, it looks like an inherent feature of the emerging order. Outside Tripoli, militia consolidation has yet to run its course, and Dabeiba may stumble while juggling competing demands from armed groups. Yet one thing is clear: the vested interests forged by years of conflict are there to stay. 

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Between Past and Future’, NLR 80.

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Goodbye Erdoğan?

Since 2019, Turkish economic policy has been characterized by Erdoğan’s repeated U-turns. Initially, his regime adopted a programme based on low interest rates and credit expansion, breaking with neoliberal orthodoxy in order to consolidate political support among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This led to the devaluation of the Lira, high rates of inflation, a mounting current account deficit and external debt, thanks to Turkey’s high dependence on imports. In an attempt to counterbalance these effects, the government pivoted to a traditional neoliberal programme: high interest rates to attract foreign capital and stabilize the value of the TL, along with credit contraction to fight inflation and indebtedness. Yet, because such policies imperil the AKP’s electoral base, the party has continually reverted to a more heterodox approach – a back-and-forth oscillation that Ümit Akcay has analyzed in these pages.

As long as the Turkish economy was integrated into the transatlantic neoliberal order, there appeared to be no alternative to Erdoğan’s zigzagging. The strategic imperative to keep SMEs afloat by means of expansionary economic policies was irreconcilable with the country’s position in the world market. However, more recently, this oscillatory movement seems to have been abandoned in favour of a firm commitment to economic heterodoxy. Since spring 2021, the interest rates of the Central Bank (TCMB) have been pushed down to the extent that real interest rates are now far into negative territory (approaching minus 80% at their nadir). Conventional Lira deposits, held by the vast majority of the population, are yielding massive losses. Meanwhile, commercial and consumer credit has been massively expanded.

As expected, these measures allowed Turkey to attain high growth figures in 2021 – but at the cost of a massive devaluation of the Lira and skyrocketing inflation. High growth concealed a massive slump in living standards for the majority of the population, whose incomes did not keep pace with inflation despite compensatory measures such as hikes in the minimum wage, price controls and tax reductions. This dynamic led to an economic standstill towards the end of 2021, as businesses were unable to make sound price calculations and lost out on commercial contracts denominated in foreign exchange. A full-scale economic catastrophe was only narrowly avoided when Erdoğan announced what was essentially a state guarantee for foreign exchange-hedged deposits on 20 December 2021.

Shortly after that, the TCMB rolled out a so-called ‘liraization strategy’ which involved de facto foreign exchange control mechanisms: restricting access to TCMB loans for companies with high amounts of foreign exchange, banning the use of foreign exchange in domestic transactions, and creating incentives for banks to switch to TL deposits. This aimed to boost private sector demand for TL and keep devaluation at bay. But because there were no deep structural changes in the Turkish economy, all the ills of this heterodox approach – devaluation, high inflation, a high current account deficit – returned or persisted. This time, though, they were accompanied by rising interest and debt.

This gave rise to an even more fatal policy paradox. Over the course of 2022, Turkey began to experiment with a series of ‘macro-prudential measures’ to contain the crisis, such as de facto capital controls – economic penalties for banks that gave out loans with interest rates above 30% – to boost low-cost lending in TL to the private sector. However, as devaluation decelerated due to the liraization strategy, the inflation rate remained above the devaluation rate, because of the delayed effect of devaluation on inflation and the inflationary pressures emanating from the world economy. This, in turn, led to the effective appreciation of the TL.

In other words, Erdoğan’s policies ended up achieving the exact opposite of what they intended. Rather than deflating the price of export goods, they managed to raise it. Similarly, lower interest rates were accompanied by a massive deceleration of lending by private banks, which saw their profit margins shrink and scrambled to offset the effects of government policy. This was only offset by another rise in public lending in autumn 2022.

The Turkish economy therefore remains caught between a rock and a hard place. The AKP is reluctant to impose neoliberal remedies yet unable to formulate a viable alternative. With presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for summer 2023 at the latest, the government’s hegemonic crisis is becoming more apparent. In this conjuncture, three distinct pathways have opened up: a mixture of improvisatory economic policies and authoritarian consolidation, favoured by the government; a full-scale neoliberal restoration, favoured by sections of capital and the main opposition; and a programme of popular-democratic reform, favoured by the left.

Implicit in Erdoğan’s new policy approach was an ‘import-substitution industrialization’ strategy, in which the high costs of imports, combined with the low cost of financing investments and cost advantages due to devaluation and low interest rates, would foster industrial investment – giving Turkey a way out of its overreliance on the world market. Yet this ambition was never likely to be realized, since its success depended on a state-led planning and/or investment strategy that was always sorely lacking. It would thus be more accurate to characterize Turkey’s recent heterodox turn as yet another attempt at crisis management rather than a transition to a new regime of accumulation. Its purpose was to protect large sections of the population, especially those who work in SMEs, from the effects of economic freefall – buying time for the AKP until the next general election.

A return to orthodox neoliberal economic policy would entail much higher political costs than an approach that tries to mitigate the effects of the crisis on SMEs and domestic consumption by simply muddling through. The AKP’s current political strategy is to position itself as the only lifeline for struggling small businesses while ramping up repression against potential threats to its hegemony. But this is not a foolproof method. For instance, high-performing SMEs that feel they can withstand the competitive pressures of an orthodox monetary policy may choose to ally with capitalists calling for an expansion of Turkey’s role in the global economy. Indeed, the factions of capital that are closest to the AKP – mostly export-oriented with lower import-dependency – have already begun to criticize the government for its botched currency devaluation.

So far, there has not been a decisive break between the leading factions of capital and the Erdoğan regime; most sectors are still returning high profits (banks have seen a whopping fivefold increase), thanks partly to wage suppression caused by inflation. But the country’s leading business association, the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSIAD), is becoming increasingly vocal in its demand to reimpose neoliberal policies, with the ultimate aim of increasing Turkey’s centrality in international production chains. It also advocates a shift away from AKP authoritarianism towards a model with more civil liberties and constitutional balances, so as to curtail what it sees as the socially destabilizing effects of the current system.

As the AKP’s interests have steadily diverged from those of big capital, the struggle between the regime and its political rivals has also come to a head. Polls show that the public mood had turned against the governing party, with its victory in the next election far from guaranteed. This has prompted the opposition bloc, led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), to go on the offensive. More often than not, this means trying to outflank Erdoğan and his allies on Turkish nationalism and chauvinism. The opposition, should it come to power, has promised the persecution and repatriation of Syrian refugees along with a full-scale war on the PKK. Its would-be Economy Minister, Ali Babacan, has vowed to continue outlawing strikes. And the bloc has remained firmly against any form of popular mobilization. As CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu asserted, ‘Active opposition is one thing, taking to the streets is another…We have only one wish, that our people should remain as calm as possible, at least until elections come.’

The opposition’s goal is to re-establish the neoliberal regime on an expanded scale, purged of its current hyper-presidential structure yet incorporating some of the authoritarian and nationalist ideological elements associated with the AKP and its predecessors, while continuing to demobilize and depoliticize the population. This will be the trade-off for any small degree of democratic reform.

Can such a vision, uninspiring as it is, succeed in galvanizing the electorate to kick out the incumbent? Polls suggest a high level of disaffection with the government, but also scepticism concerning the opposition. Erdoğan, despite his various missteps, has been adept at maintaining the identitarian connection between his party and its base – which, combined with his short-term populist and redistributionary programme (including subsidies for household bills, further wage increases, social housing and state-led credit programmes for SMEs), may be enough to keep him in power. The most recent polls show an uptick for the AKP following the announcement of such measures.

No matter who wins the next election, though, there remains an alternative for Turkey beyond authoritarian consolidation and neoliberal restoration. It lies in new outfits such as the Labour and Freedom Alliance (Emek ve Özgürlük İttifakı), a coalition of pro-Kurdish and leftist parties which aims to unify these dissident forces. For them, the only route out of national crisis is a coherent, democratically-accountable economic strategy that fundamentally alters the Turkish model in favour of the popular classes, along with far-reaching political reform. Their attempts to organize in an increasingly repressive climate will be an uphill battle, but unless it is fought, the prospect of democratizing Turkey will vanish entirely.

Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads?’, NLR 127

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The Death Gap

There’s no injustice more frightening – more definitive, more irredeemable – than inequality of life expectancy: a form of discrimination whereby years, sometimes decades, are stolen from the majority and given to a select few, based solely on their wealth and social class.

Indeed, the most important form of ‘social distance’ imposed by the pandemic was not spatial, not a matter of meters. It was the temporal distance between rich and poor, between those who could escape the worst effects of the virus and those whose lives were abbreviated by it. Modernity established a biopolitical chasm – a social distancing of death – that was widened and accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis. This was demonstrated by a litany of studies across various countries. For instance:

In this retrospective analysis of 1,988,606 deaths in California during 2015 to 2021, life expectancy declined from 81.40 years in 2019 to 79.20 years in 2020 and 78.37 years in 2021. Life expectancy differences between the census tracts in the highest and lowest income percentiles increased from 11.52 years in 2019 to 14.67 years in 2020 and 15.51 years in 2021.

Many political and scientific discussions are rooted in calculations of life expectancy at birth. But though this criterion holds for modern Western societies, where infant mortality is almost irrelevant, it is misleading when applied to other geographical regions or historical periods. If the average lifetime lasts 70 years, to compensate for every infant death another seven people must live to 80. This is why life expectancy is often calculated at age 40 or 50: a historically more reliable indicator in its exclusion of infant mortality, as well as war deaths, car accidents (more frequent amongst young people) and maternal fatalities in childbirth.

Here is life expectancy at 40 against household income in the United States, as outlined in a study published by The Harvard Gazette in 2016:

As you can see, the gap between the richest and poorest 1% is just over 10 years for women and 15 years for men: ‘roughly equivalent to the life expectancy difference between the United States and Sudan. For women, the 10-year difference between richest and poorest is equivalent to the health effects from a lifetime of smoking’.

Another notable phenomenon, to which we’ll return later, is the fact that the graph never flattens, regardless of one’s income level:

While researchers have long known that life expectancy increases with income, Cutler and others were surprised to find that trend never plateaued: “There’s no income [above] which higher income is not associated with greater longevity, and there’s no income below which less income is not associated with lower survival”, he said. “It was already known that life expectancy increased with income, so we’re not the first to show that, but…everyone thought you had to hit a plateau at some point, or that it would plateau at the bottom, but that’s not the case.”

The difference between the lifespans of different classes wasn’t always so abyssal. It has increased progressively in recent centuries, such that it has now become a constant of modern civilization. The gulf is plainly visible in the below graph, which shows life expectancy at 65 for male workers, divided into categories of higher and lower-earners:

We can see how, in 1912, poorer workers could expect to live to just under 80, while their wealthier counterparts could expect to live to just over that. In 1941, the margin dilates: the former could expect to live around a year longer than in 1921, while the latter gained a full six years (average life expectancy increases with the age at which it is calculated: at 30 it’s higher than at birth, at 50 it’s longer than at 30, and at 65 it’s even longer, because at every step you discount all deaths that occurred prior to that age and contributed to the original average. This is why, in 1912, the life expectancy of the poorer half of 65-year-olds almost reached 80, whereas life expectancy at birth was only 55).

The picture is even more stark if you divide society not into two, but into five different income classes. These graphs, taken from a Congressional study in 2006, show the average life expectancy growing massively for the richest quintile (20% of the population) and rising meagrely for the poorest:

A closer look gives us an astonishing picture. For males in the lowest income quintile, those born in 1930 could expect to live 26.6 years at age 50, while those born in 1960, after World War II, could expect to live 26.1 years: counterintuitively half a year less! The phenomenon was even more pronounced for the poorest women: those born in 1930 at the age of 50 had an average of 32.3 years ahead of them, while those of the next generation had 28.3: almost four years less life: while life in general was getting longer, for the poorest women it was getting shorter, and by quite a lot.

The music changes for the highest income quintile: those born in 1960 can expect to live 38.8 years (i.e. to reach 88 years and nine months), a full 7.1 years longer than their predecessors born in 1930 who had a life expectancy of 31.7 years. The same trend is true for rich women born in 1960 who can expect to live 41.9 years (i.e. to 91 years and 10 months), more than rich women born thirty years earlier whose life expectancy was 36.2 years, i.e. 5.7 years less: between the two generations, while for poor women life expectancy shortens, for rich women it lengthens.

In the thirty years between 1930 and 1960, the income gap had thus widened frighteningly. Whereas among men born in 1930 the richest lived 5.1 years longer than their poorest peers, for the generation born in 1960 the gap had widened to an astonishing 12.7 years. The gap among women was even more pronounced: whereas for the 1930 generation the richest could hope to live 4.0 years longer than their poorer peers, for the 1960 generation the gap had widened to 13.6 years.

Since we the segmented data on household income to extend this analysis further back in time, we must make do with a few scattered clues. If we take the dynasties of Italian nobles during the Renaissance (the Estes, Gonzagas, Medicis), we find that princes were generally outlived by their artists, chancellors and courtiers. This is understandable. Without truly effective medical sciences and developed systems of hygiene (such as sewers and running water), there was no reason for the rich to live longer than the poor – and there is a strong indication that their habits (overeating, alcohol consumption) made them more fragile.

The first great fractures occurred precisely with the introduction of sewage systems and running water, which sanitized the homes of the rich, where they were first installed. Child mortality eased first amongst the more comfortable classes. Dietetics taught the wealthy to better nourish themselves and do more exercise (hence the diffusion of sport: physical exertion whose end was neither profit nor sustenance). And then, naturally, the gap widened even further with the medical advances of the twentieth century. Modern medicine – especially when privatized and dependant on discriminatory insurance regimes – became an accelerator of inequality.

We are now living the world described by Rousseau, where inequality is created and then sharpened by civilization:

the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, slavery and wretchedness.

The arts and sciences – ‘progress’, in other words – does nothing but exacerbate inequality and the struggle for property. Immiseration for the poor, fortification for the rich. How could this fail to lengthen the life of the powerful and shorten (relatively speaking) that of their subjects?

Of course, if inequalities in life continue to multiply year-on-year, one would expect the same of inequalities in death. The aforementioned researchers at Harvard were shocked by the fact that in the US, the life expectancy/income gap didn’t seem to plateau, neither at the top nor the bottom of the scale. In France, however, the curve flattens, as shown by this graph:

There, as in the USA, data for life expectancy at birth presents a marked gap between classes: a difference of almost 13 years for men and over 8 for women. But unlike in the US, the curve slows rapidly, almost plateauing over the threshold of €2,500 per month in net income (after taxes and social security). Gross income is usually around double this figure, so it’s at the threshold of €60,000 per year that we see this change, with the line becoming almost horizontal above a monthly net income of €3,500.

The only possible explanation seems to lie in the fact that the French public health system is easier to navigate the higher one’s level of education (with all the income and lifestyle differentials that implies):

Here, too, the curve flattens visibly above the €2,000 mark (we can assume that few of those who earn a yearly income of €60,000 don’t possess at least a secondary school diploma). This is despite the fact that there is an increasing gap between those with an undergraduate degree and those without a diploma (a difference of a little under three years for the same income group of under €1,000 per month, and nearly four and a half at net income of €3,500). In short, studying earns you almost three years of life. Perhaps if children were told this they would strive for better grades.

Until now we’ve discussed life in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. But what kind of life are we talking about? In the UK, researchers have developed separate metrics for life expectancy (lifespan) and the expected length of a healthy life (healthspan). Here are their findings:

‘Heathy life experience’, they conclude,

has also increased over time, but not as much as life expectancy, so more years are spent in poor health. Although a male in England could expect to live 79.4 years in 2018-20, his average healthy life expectancy was only 63.1 years – ie, he would have spent 16.3 of those years (20%) in ‘no good’ health.  In 2018–20 a female in England could expect to live 83.1 years, of which 19.3 years (23 per cent) would have been spent in ‘not good’ health. And although females live an average of 3.7 years longer than males, most of that time (3 years) is spent in poor health.

Not only do the poor live shorter lives than the rich (around 74 years versus 84 for men; 79 and 86 for women). Of this shorter existence, a larger part is lived in weakness and infirmity (for men, 26.6 years compared to 14; for women, 26.4 years compared to 15.8). The result is that the poor enjoy 18 fewer healthy years.

In an effort to extend the length of life, then, we’ve prolonged the length of death. The masters of the earth – those whose fortunes exceed the GDP of several nation states – have clearly realized this. Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine (2017) documents the frantic, infantile fantasies of these Lords of the Cosmos, who strive to achieve immortality through financing both the development of cryopreservation projects such as Alcor Life Extension Foundation, ‘where clients sign up to be frozen on dying in the hope not just of resuscitation but rejuvenation’ – as well as research into technology that would allow one to download one’s brain onto a hard disk or a cloud, so as to reincarnate, perhaps even as a computer, with all one’s memory intact.

In the absence of such technological breakthroughs, though, the masters of the universe have now dedicated considerable resources to realizing the more mundane aim of extending their lives by a few years, or perhaps a few decades. Since 2013, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page & co. have been investing in businesses developing anti-aging pharmaceuticals:

With just two short sentences posted on his personal blog in September 2013, Google co-founder Larry Page unveiled Calico, a ‘health and wellbeing company’ focused on tackling ageing. Almost a year earlier he had persuaded Arthur Levinson, the driving force behind the biotech giant Genentech and chairman of Apple, to oversee the new business and lined up $1.5bn in funding pledges – half from Google, the balance from AbbVie, the pharmaceutical company.

In 2022 the venture capital firm Arc Venture Partner, Jeff Bezos and another billionaire Yuri Milner, invested $3 billion in Altos Lab, whose self-declared mission is to ‘restore cell health and resilience through cellular rejuvenation programming to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life’. The billionaires of Silicon Valley believe their money can enable them not only to live longer, but to live well, while preserving the prospect of immortality for their offspring.

Once this is achieved, they will finally have a rejoinder to Max Weber’s famous remark in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). To the pre-capitalist subject, he writes,

that anyone should be able to make it the sole purpose of his life-work, to sink into the grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods, seems explicable only as the product of a perverse instinct, the auri sacra fames.

To this, the lords of the universe will reply: ‘There is no grave we will sink into!’

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti

Read on: Marco D’Eramo, ‘Celebrity Thaumaturge’, NLR 74.

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Difficult Nations

I have never been to Greece before, but at the level of the life-world it feels completely familiar: numerous small markets, cafes, apothecaries, the occasional bookstore, chaotic traffic patterns with death-defying scooter-riders weaving between buses and taxis. In one sense Athens seems a generic southern European city. Of course there are differences, especially compared to Rome. The economic fragility is more palpable; an elegant turn of the century shopping centre that reminds me of the big one in Central Milano now sits completely abandoned, the windows still bearing the names of jewellers, upscale clothing stores and restaurants that catered to people with incomes they no longer have. Then there is the empty shell of the Hotel Sans Rival just down the street from where I am staying. Around the corner from it one finds a derelict school alongside a forlorn and garbage-filled basketball court populated by the stray cats which are ubiquitous in Athens. (Giorgos, my host from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, misses no opportunity to pet them, which reminds me slightly of Emanuela.) The graffiti is also bolder and more colourful than in Rome, rising to cover most of the buildings from street-level to three or four feet off the ground. But these are all differences of degree rather than kind.

Another striking similarity between Rome and Athens is the way they exemplify the difficult relationship between their national and ancient pasts. One of the things that drove Emanuela mad about the tourists in Rome was how little interest they usually expressed in the country’s national history. The crowds would rush past Il museo del Risorgimento on their way to Trajan’s Market or the Forum. How many of them paid attention to the massive statue of Garibaldi that overlooks the Janiculum Hill above the Vatican? I have the same sense in Athens; in fact, here it is even more extreme. In the morning I visited the Museum of National History located in the old parliament building. The exhibits commemorating the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence tell a story of the struggle of the ‘enslaved’ Hellenes against their Ottoman oppressors.

There are certain oddities about the tale, such as the fact that no one seemed to know quite what or where ‘Greece’ was. The attempt by Alexander Ypsilantis (the Greek Garibaldi) to raise an army of volunteers known to history as the ‘Sacred Band’ unfolded in Moldavia and Wallachia – present-day Romania. As the exhibit shows, the Greeks were scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean in small, basically self-governing units. Did they imagine themselves to be a nation? The curators in any case had clearly read their Benedict Anderson. A printing press was prominently displayed alongside the ‘traditional costumes’ and other artefacts of Greek life before independence. But the most striking thing about the place was that it was almost empty except for myself and a middle-aged American couple, the three of us dutifully reading the plaques as we silently moved around the upper balcony.

The contrast with my early afternoon visit to the Acropolis was enormous. When I finally reached the ticket office it was approaching noon and a lengthy cosmopolitan line stretched out before me. Snippets of French, Spanish, Italian, English, German and Russian floated above the throng, but there was very little Greek. As we tourists waited, the sun cooked us from above and also from below as it bounced off the white marble paving stones that had been installed sometime in the sixties. It was a good-natured queue: polite and relaxed families with couples young and old. I was the only single person as far as I could see; a poignant reminder that I should have been doing this with her.

Affixed to the ticket office was a large white sign with the EU flag on it, announcing that the Acropolis had been decreed a ‘European Heritage Site’ and declaring that this was the place ‘where Europe began’. Here, it stated, democracy, science, philosophy and theatre had been invented. Since these pursuits and institutions were supposedly the defining features of ‘Europe’, then it too must have been invented here. It was hard to swallow this massive dose of Euro-Ideology for several reasons. First there’s the problem of veracity. Is it really true, no matter how remarkable classical Athens was, that all of these things were invented on the Acropolis? Second, even if it were true, why was this the beginning of ‘Europe’? How can Europe, or even worse the EU, claim to be the sole legitimate heir of Athens? After all, until the nineteenth century there was both a mosque and a church inside the Parthenon; Alexander spread Greek civilization far into Asia; and there is the obvious problem of North Africa and the significance of Aristotle for the Muslim world. Third, what of the current relationship between Europe and Greece? To call it strained would be an understatement, given how much damage the Troika’s ferocious belt-tightening measures have done. It’s no surprise that EU flags are very often defaced here.

Perhaps the deeper issue, which creates a certain commonality between Italy and Greece, is the difficulty of linking a pre-national past of purportedly universal significance to a national present that seems to be a second-hand version of the more ‘advanced’ west. Emanuela’s irritation expressed precisely this sense. Both Italy and Greece face such a problem: their greatness as civilizations preceded by centuries the arrival of the nation-state, and the universalization of that political form relegated them to a ‘semi-peripheral’ status. Thus the paradox of Italian or Greek national identity is that these nationalisms, while seeming to have an extremely strong symbolic basis in a charismatic past, can only access that past through the mediation of third-parties who legitimate it as a common ‘European’ one. The national population in both cases is condemned to play the role of curator of a heritage which is not quite its own.

One can therefore understand the hatred that the futurists felt for the past combined with the fetishization of speed, the cult of the new, and the elevation of Milan to the status of an anti-Rome. Futurism was really an attempt to escape the trap of antiquity by establishing a tabula rasa on which to build a renewed national spirit. But this attempt was also doomed to failure, since futurism’s cult of the new was compelled to refer to, and thereby carry within itself, the very antiquity that it rejected.

Black Sheep

We must have walked four or five miles wending our way first through the upscale shopping districts, and then passing by Syntagma Square where the communist party was holding a protest against rising fuel prices, before finally strolling along the broad marble-paved walking path that skirts the southern edge of the Acropolis. The setting sun had painted the Parthenon pink. Giorgos pointed out the massive apartments whose broad windows and balconies opened onto views of the temple. Many were empty – a consequence of the fact that some of their politician-owners were languishing in jail on corruption charges. We stopped to take a selfie in front of the Hellenic parliament, and as we continued our walk he gave me a brief history lesson. The main points he wanted to convey were these.

First, the Greek bourgeoisie was fundamentally diasporic. It had returned to ‘Greece’ only after being expelled from the Ottoman lands as nationalism took hold. Second, Greece has historically lacked a class of large landholders. This was partly the result of the policy of its liberal national leadership to distribute land in small plots so as to avoid the agrarian problem. Third, Greek urbanization had been extremely rapid in the 1960s, and this had created a paradoxical cityscape; one that is both ancient and hyper-modern with little in between. The layering of historical levels one feels in London, Rome or Paris is largely missing in Athens.

Our conversation wrapped up as we neared The Black Sheep – the restaurant where we were to meet two of Giorgos’s colleagues from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Rosa and Phoebe. Rosa appeared just as we settled down at our table. She and Giorgos embraced, and their connection seemed to embody an overlapping set of bonds that were almost familial; they were friends, colleagues, political comrades. Physically the two contrasted sharply: Giorgos tall, dark, slightly heavy-set with an angular nose and intelligent brown eyes under a sharply defined brow; he appeared stereotypically ‘Greek’. Rosa by contrast had bleach blonde hair and soft features. She exuded energy, positivity, fitness. The food arrived, along with the simple refreshing wine that lubricated every evening I spent in Athens, and the conversation ranged widely: from Rosa’s boxing classes and observations about how her fellow pugilists seemed to be searching for an outlet more fulfilling than unemployment or their shitty jobs, to the legacy of the civil war of the late 1940s, to the American west and the foibles of US progressivism.

Rosa described her upbringing as the daughter of a communist family in a deeply conservative village in northern Greece. The communist kids, she explained, played, ate and socialized together, and above all did not go to church on Sundays. Her father travelled regularly to Bulgaria to meet comrades and perhaps to vacation – though when he returned to Greece he would try to point out that not everything was going well up north. Given this background, it was no accident that she shared a name with the Stiftung: Luxemburg was her namesake. Phoebe also described her political formation, explaining that she had worked in some capacity for a UN agency in Berlin but had grown disillusioned with their do-nothingism and was now back in Athens, excited to be involved in the Stiftung.

Toward the end of the evening I posed a question to the group. ‘Could any of you ever imagine being romantically involved with someone not on the left?’ They laughed, a bit taken aback by my query. All of them, after a brief consideration, rejected the idea. ‘It might be exciting at first,’ said Rosa, ‘but to be on the left is to adopt a view of the world, a way of life.’ The others agreed. This of course points to an important difference between the US and those countries that have had substantial communist or at least Marxist movements and parties. In Greece, or Italy or France, political traditions are rooted in a social milieu that spreads out from the sphere of formal politics and toward leisure time, friendship and romantic attachment. In the US, however, the sphere of politics and everyday life remain sharply distinct. To restrict one’s friends or circle of potential partners to ‘the left’ would mean either social isolation or membership in a cult or sect. It is possible that this is changing to some extent now as the widely condemned but in my opinion quite healthy and normal phenomenon of ‘political polarization’ would seem to show.

But caution should be used here, as the specificity of the US often forecloses comparisons and apparent convergences. For the phenomenon of US political polarization cannot be understood in terms of the historical categories of left and right as they emerged in Europe after the French Revolution. One might restrict oneself exclusively to Democratic Party voters in social interaction for decades without ever meeting a person of the left. This is true even within the Sanders wing of the party, which encompasses an amorphous spectrum of opinion stretching from Brandeis-type partisans of the regulatory state to the varieties of Kautskyist who shelter under the DSA banner. The lack of a tradition, or a shared set of intellectual references, or a worldview in the strong sense will take decades to repair. In the meantime, to be on the left but also to be a person in the US demands a sort of lived eclecticism or embodied pluralism which is quite distinct from the experience described by my Greek hosts.

Fritz

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is an admirably internationalist organization as befits its name – with branches in several European countries as well as the US and Mexico. But it is an internationalism with ‘German characteristics’. This is particularly evident in the leadership of the local offices. Each branch must have a German director; in the Athens office, this post is held by a man named Fritz. The evening of the presentation, he stood out immediately as an exemplar of his national type among the Greeks; he had close-cropped white hair, a triangular nose, an earring, and wore a pink linen shirt that seemed a bit like beach clothing. I was most struck by his sad grey eyes. His manner was ever so slightly formal and deferential, something I had not experienced from any of the Greeks. But he later revealed himself to be a profoundly sensitive and perceptive soul.

We were seated across from one another at the lovely taverna where the Stiftung hosted a post-seminar dinner and he explained the difficulties of his situation. Above all, there was the matter of the language. Fritz was taking classes but it was slow going, and the Greek alphabet added another layer of difficulty. He felt isolated, and missed Berlin. At dinner he was the only person to order a beer; I had briefly considered asking for one too in order to soften his sense of isolation, but chose at the last moment to drink wine because it went so well with the food. As I did so I felt slightly guilty, as if I had somehow betrayed him. He then asked if I had a family. This was the first time since Emanuela’s passing that the question had arisen in this sort of setting, and it recalled the numerous times I had spoken of her and described our lives together to relative strangers after giving a paper or speaking. I found myself saying in reply that I had once had a family, but that my wife had died tragically and that my son now attends college in Texas.

Poor Fritz clearly felt that he had committed a tremendous faux pas by asking me, but it was quite natural for him to do so since I was, and still am, wearing my wedding ring. In fact Fritz’s question had been prompted by an observation that showed him, at least in my view, to be a remarkably observant person. He said that he had noticed during the Q&A session that I was touching my ring as if to draw comfort from it. I was not aware of this, but was grateful to him for having pointed it out. It made me feel somehow near to her. I then asked if he had ever been married. ‘Once, for five years,’ he replied. ‘We parted amicably and I realized that I’m just not meant for that sort of thing; better to be alone.’

At this point, a fascinating episode started to unfold. It began with Rosa, who wielded an easy authority in dinner conversation, turning the discussion toward a mysterious episode in her father’s past involving a deployment to Cyprus in the sixties. Fritz seized the opportunity opened by Rosa’s story to share a rather extraordinary piece of his own family history. He was going through his grandfather’s papers and found a letter of recommendation; it must have been from the late 1930s, written by the local party official warmly recommending his grandfather for a position as a veterinarian. The letter deplored the local situation where non-party individuals were advancing in their careers while old NSDAP members such as Fritz’s grandfather could not progress. The situation was all the more scandalous since the grandfather had been involved in an important paramilitary action as a member of the SA (the earlier, more plebeian version of the SS) which had resulted in the death of a communist. Fritz had become obsessed with researching the incident, which took place in 1932, so as to better understand his grandfather’s part in it. This led him to the discovery of a large archival box containing a photograph that, to Fritz’s astonishment, showed his grandfather not only participating in the action but leading a column of SA men through the town where it had taken place.

He then pulled out his cell phone and showed us a picture of the column with an imposing bald man at its head who, he said, was his grandfather. ‘What became of him?’ Rosa asked. To which Fritz simply replied, ‘Stalingrad.’ We all expressed some scepticism, as he was clearly already well into middle age in 1932 and must have been in his fifties by the winter of 1941. But Fritz reminded us that he was a veterinarian and such people were highly valued in the Wehrmacht because of the importance of horses to Hitler’s armies. ‘Family history is fascinating,’ Rosa remarked. ‘There is always a dark secret to be revealed.’ ‘Especially among you Europeans,’ I joked. To which she quite rightly responded that there were certainly dark secrets in American family histories too. True enough, I thought to myself, although the American twentieth century had been so comparatively placid that its population has been somewhat insulated from those fundamental political choices that many Europeans have had to face, and which generate, after all, the dark secrets to which Rosa referred.

Read on: Dylan Riley, ‘Lockdown Limbo’, NLR 127.

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Peronist Legacies

On the night of 1 September 2022, around 9:30pm, the news began to spread like wildfire, first on social media and later on every TV channel and radio station in the country: someone had tried to kill Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK), the current vice-president and former president of Argentina. Earlier that evening, a crowd of kirchneristas had come together in the well-to-do neighborhood of Recoleta in Buenos Aires to support CFK amid her ongoing corruption trial, which they saw as a classic case of lawfare orchestrated by political elites. At 9:15pm, CFK’s car pulled up in front of her house and she stepped out to greet the crowd. Suddenly, a man approached her, held out a 7.5mm Versa semi-automatic weapon and pulled the trigger – but the gun failed to go off.   

After the would-be assassin was apprehended, the episode gradually faded from the headlines and the public moved on. Yet the attack reflected a significant change in Argentinian politics. CFK’s assailant, 35-year-old Fernando Sabag Montiel, is a supporter of the reactionary upstart Javier Milei – a former media personality and economics professor who recently entered mainstream politics. His coalition La Libertad Avanza performed surprisingly well in the 2021 primary elections in Buenos Aires, running on an ultra-conservative platform that nostalgized Argentina’s military dictatorship. The ability of such forces to inspire acts of violence signals an alarming historical regression. Far-right discourses that had been almost eradicated from the public sphere following the democratic transition of 1983 have now been reanimated. To understand how this has happened, it is necessary to recap on the contested legacy of Peronism and examine its role in the current Argentinian conjuncture.

*

The election of Juan Domingo Perón in February 1946 was a turning point for Argentina: a rebuke to an ossified political establishment that refused to recognize the demands of a growing layer of urban workers. Perón was already popular thanks to his record as Labour Secretary between 1943 and 1945. As president, he enacted unprecedented income redistribution while greatly expanding the welfare state, and was reelected in 1951 with 63.51% of the vote – the highest share in national history.

This broad support base allowed him to integrate trade unions into the state structure, which limited their autonomy and consolidated the power of his Justicialist Party. Indeed, Peronism grew in direct proportion to the cooptation or repression of previous union leaders, especially those with Socialist or Communist affiliations. During his decade in power, he took an authoritarian approach to opponents across the political spectrum, shuttering newspapers and persecuting activist groups. Yet his popularity remained high thanks to strong growth rates and continued progressive policies.

The economy began to show signs of exhaustion in 1949, however, as inflation rose following the depletion of Argentina’s foreign exchange reserves – precipitating a turn to austerity. This downward trend, alongside increasing conflict between Peronism and the Catholic church, provided the pretext for a major backlash from domestic elites and significant factions of the military. In September 1955, Perón was overthrown in a right-wing putsch and a military dictatorship was installed. The coup-makers presented Peronism as a populist virus that had poisoned the otherwise prosperous Argentina of the 1940s. The leader was exiled, the Judicialist Party was proscribed, and it became illegal to so much as mention his name or that of the former First Lady Eva Perón.

For more than fifteen years, Argentina alternated between military regimes and ‘democratic’ governments while Peronism remained banned. During the 1960s, political violence became a fact of daily life, as the leftist People’s Revolutionary Army and Montoneros expanded their guerrilla activities while the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance meted out paramilitary repression in coordination with the state. The Peronist youth were radicalized to the left, and called on the exiled president to return home and resolve the crisis. In 1973 they got their wish. Perón flew back to Argentina, won the national elections and reassumed high office. Yet he died of a heart attack the following year, and his widow Isabel Martínez de Perón came to power amid a turbulent economic situation and an uptick in political conflict.

The resultant disorder paved the way for a new military coup, the bloodiest in Argentine history, which took place in March 1976. The new government quickly launched its so-called ‘National Reorganization Process’ in the hope of accomplishing what eighteen years of proscription could not: the eradication of Peronism as a political alternative and popular identity. This involved a campaign of repression against the country’s labour movement and the decimation of its industrial base. By 1983, Argentina’s manufacturing sector had declined from 21.78% to 19.22% as a share of GDP, while foreign debt – both public and private – had risen from 14.4% to 39.7%.

The military junta was put on the backfoot by the economic chaos unleashed by its liberalizing reforms and the disastrous end to the Malvinas War. Utterly discredited, it had no choice but to call presidential elections in 1983, whereupon Argentina entered a new democratic era. The victory of Raul Alfonsin and the centrist Unión Civica Radical that year was a landmark: the first time Peronism was defeated by non-violent political means. For the next two decades, the UCR acted as the main alternative to Perón’s party, and power changed hands peacefully. In 1989, the Judicialists returned to government with Carlos Menem at the helm, but by now their economic priorities had shifted. Though he had promised to revive domestic industry and increase wages during his campaign, Menem switched course while in office and attempted to finish what the dictatorship had started: privatizing public companies, dismantling the last remainders of the welfare state and remaking Argentina in the image of the Washington Consensus.

The effect was a series of deep changes in Argentina’s social structure. During the 1990s poverty became endemic, unemployment rose and the informal economy expanded. Such problems were compounded by the financial crisis of 2001. However, when Nestor Kirchner, a Peronist from Southern Patagonia, won the national elections in 2003, the economy began to see the benefits of the global commodities boom. There followed a period of relative prosperity, with stronger welfare policies and higher living standards. CFK succeeded Kirchner in 2007 and retained these social-democratic provisions, winning reelection in 2011 with more than 54% of the vote.

If Perón integrated the new urban working class into his power bloc, CFK took a similar approach to the crowded suburbs around Buenos Aires, where those in low-income jobs lived alongside informal workers. She also won over a strategic sector of the middle class who had benefited from the commodity boom. It thus seemed possible that a new iteration of Peronism – kirchnerismo – would repeat its original success. Yet from 2011 onward this project began to come apart. As commodities prices fell and markets were hit by the financial crash, inflation became a chronic issue. Growth stalled along with CFK’s progress on poverty reduction. A coherent developmental strategy was necessary to survive in the jungle of the world economy, including progressive tax reform, a plan to increase the export of Argentinian services and a reduction in regressive public expenditures. But such measures were not forthcoming. In their absence, Argentina had no ballast against the global headwinds.

The impasse of kirchnerismo enabled the right to mount an effective ideological assault on the Peronist tradition more generally. Evoking the rhetoric of the erstwhile military dictatorship, they asserted that Perón’s legacy was a pathology which prevented Argentina from becoming a typical Western country with a flourishing free market. The sooner it was abandoned, the better. This was the platform that propelled Mauricio Macri to power in 2015.

A former businessman with an elite education, Macri was more of a traditional right-wing politician than the radicales of the 1990s: culturally conservative, in favour of free-market reform, with close ties to international finance. Yet he accepted the new settlement in which outright violence was no longer a legitimate weapon against political opponents. He instead presented himself as a champion of meritocracy and efficiency, as well as a moral censor who would combat the corrupt practices of kirchnerismo. After four years in office, the impact of his presidency was plain to see: soaring inflation, a spike in poverty levels and an IMF bailout that massively increased the country’s foreign debt. Macri failed to enact any significant structural reforms, and though he reduced the fiscal deficit, this came at the cost of abolishing energy subsidies and cutting public-sector jobs – which resulted in a growing middle-class discontent.

It was on this basis that Peronism once again triumphed in the 2019 elections, with Alberto Fernandez becoming president and CFK his deputy. Their new coalition, Frente de Todos, encompassed almost every opposition grouping: from conservative Catholic outfits to left-wing social movements to centrist technocrats. Accordingly, it struggled formulate a coherent response to the economic problems inherited from Macri, and soon descended into internecine conflict. This dynamic was aggravated by the Covid-19 crisis. Although Fernandez’s public health measures proved relatively successful, their knock-on effects were damaging for the economy, and the president’s reputation was not helped by the revelation that he had attended a party at the height of lockdown.

In the mid-term elections of September 2021, the government was punished for its record – reflecting the Latin America-wide trend towards anti-incumbency. Macri’s coalition re-emerged as the leading opposition force, and although the Frente de Todos kept its majority at the Cámara de Diputados, it lost the Senate, forcing it to make further political compromises. The real surprise, though, was the success of Javier Milei, who picked up 16.5% of the vote in Buenos Aires and became a federal deputy. Meanwhile, the Frente de Izquierda, a coalition of Argentine Trotskyist parties, received around 5% of the national vote: a tally they have been getting for the last ten years without being able to improve it. In practical terms, this means they have a two or three national congressmen yet no real influence beyond their speeches in the chamber.

The election results deepened divisions within the government, sparking a series of high-level resignations by cabinet ministers and officials. Although the mainstream press presented this as a personal dispute between Fernandez and CFK, the actual situation was more complex. Fundamentally, it was a disagreement over the meaning of Peronism in the 21st century – how it might reduce inflation and stimulate growth. Fernandez seems more eager to reduce public spending and improve conditions for international investors, whereas CFK leans towards keeping welfarism alive through more progressive taxation. With the appointment of Sergio Massa, a centrist technocrat, as Finance Minister, it appears that Fernandez’s faction is advancing. At the recent conclusion to CFK’s corruption trial, the vice president was sentenced to six years in prison for the misuse of funds for public works projects. She is expected to appeal, yet the verdict will further damage her credibility, even though the charges strongly suggest some form of political interference.  

*

Whereas Perón managed to incorporate the working class into the state and pass redistributive policies, his legatees have had no such success. Since 2011, the absence of an economic growth engine has deprived them of a viable reformist programme. Despite the hope that CFK initially inspired, she did not manage to heal Argentina’s structural divisions – between economic sectors highly integrated into global markets and informal industries where workers struggle to eke out a basic living. As a result, it is likely that Macri or one of his political allies will win the next election – looming later this year – by capitalizing on disappointment with kirchnerismo. Yet they too will struggle to build a stable majority, since their ideological outlook is founded on the longstanding conviction that Argentina’s problems will be solved, and it will finally become a typical developed nation, once it finally breaks with Peronism. This belief, which drove the coups of the 1950s and 1970s, means that the Argentinian right has always lacked a distinctive political project.

In this sense, neither of Argentina’s two primary political forces is capable of presenting a hegemonic vision. The kirchneristas are missing a unified diagnosis of the country’s problems, while the macristas are clinging to a demonstrably mistaken one. Such paralysis has created an opening for an outsider like Milei to present a radical solution. Milei’s programme is similar to that of Bolsonaro in Brazil. Portraying himself as an outsider, he blames the expansion of public spending and the unions’ strength – along with liberal cultural mores – for the maladies affecting Argentina. His solution is to abolish central banks, eliminate all market regulation, champion state repression and promote the traditional family (for example, by banning abortion).

Another failed macrismo government will only heighten the appeal of these positions. After forty years of democracy, people are frustrated with the incumbent and anxious about the future – a combination that the far-right is currently exploiting. The assassination attempt against CFK might thus form part of a broader pattern, similar to what we have witnessed in Brazil, where reactionary authoritarianism gains mainstream legitimation. If this trend takes hold in Argentina, the country will need an active and resilient left to oppose it.

Read on: Jeremy Adelman, ‘Post-Populist Argentina’, NLR I/203.

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Blue Shifts

In the United States’ 2022 midterm elections, the Democratic Party narrowly averted the devastating rout predicted by most pundits. The GOP will have a slim majority in the House of Representatives while the Democrats will enjoy a 51 seat edge in the US Senate on account of Raphael Warnock’s reelection in Georgia to a full Senate term. As with every major election since 2016, the refrain of many Democrats throughout the campaign was that democracy itself was on the line. Months of handwringing over inflation stoked fears that MAGA candidates would repeat the Tea Party’s success during Obama’s tenure – a red wave credited with hastening the collapse of Democratic power across the South and Midwest, fuelling the emergence of Trumpism. Now, the avoidance of this humiliating outcome is being touted as tantamount to a blue victory.

In assessments of the results, the campaigns of two key Senate candidates, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio and Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, have been frequently cited to illustrate the Democrats’ vulnerabilities and prospects in the industrial Midwest and interior Northeast. Ryan, who has served in the House of Representatives since 2003, had spent the majority of his political career in the ideological wilderness – yet his previously marginal policy concerns have since become mainstream. He ran on his record as a pro-labour protectionist and champion of declining manufacturing regions who had helped sustain his party’s links with industrial workers. Nonetheless, he was roundly defeated (by a margin of 264,675 votes) by Republican JD Vance, a conservative memoirist and venture capitalist who, with Peter Thiel’s financial backing, adopted a demagogic ‘postliberal’ persona. In Pennsylvania, however, Fetterman’s successful campaign deployed many of the same themes, thereby raising hopes for the Democrats that they may recapture certain deindustrialized regions that have gravitated toward Trump. A charismatic former small-town major with a giantesque stature and uniform of Carhartt sweatshirts, Fetterman prevailed over TV personality ‘Dr’ Mehmet Oz by a five-point margin (just over 260,000 votes) despite suffering a stroke in May.

Both Ryan and Fetterman pledged to revive high-wage manufacturing jobs while protecting abortion and LGBT rights from Republican advances. They also shared a hawkish line on China, an unambiguous defence of Israel, support for fracking, and opposition to activist calls to ‘defund the police’. Yet, in spite of their similar messaging, most progressives were antagonized by Ryan and energized by Fetterman. Mainstream liberals, too, were generally wary of the former and fond of the latter. What explains such divergent perceptions? And what do their respective campaigns mean for the future of the party?

Pessimism over the Democrats’ prospects in Ohio dampened Ryan’s campaign from the outset. Vance was always the poster candidate of his party’s right, thanks to his combination of evangelical conservatism and fervent MAGA populism (one of his campaign ads asked the viewer, ‘Are you a racist?’). Yet in a state that had voted for Trump by eight percentage points in both 2016 and 2020, Ryan’s supporters nevertheless hoped for an upset. Indeed, the early signals for Ryan were good: in the primary, he easily beat Morgan Harper, a young progressive lawyer who touted her support for Medicare For All and a Green New Deal, raising expectations that he had the backing of both the party establishment and progressives.

Ryan’s support for industrial policy made him an outlier in his party until Joe Biden declared a ‘paradigm shift’ at the start of his presidency. This abrupt departure from the precedent set by the Clinton and Obama administrations reinforced Ryan’s focus on trade and manufacturing workers in his campaign. Ohio is fourth among US states in manufacturing GDP on account of its production of plastics, appliances, autos and other value-added goods, yet its industrial base has been depleted by around 359,000 jobs over the past thirty years due to successive trade shocks – a decline Trump exploited with greater success in Ohio than any other competitive rustbelt state.

Although some of Ryan’s supporters assumed that the neo-Hamiltonian industrial strategy of the Biden White House would aid his chances against Vance, Ryan continued to distinguish himself from the Democratic establishment. He discouraged Biden from running for reelection in 2024 and provocatively declared that he ‘agreed with Trump on trade’ (while also asserting, ‘I don’t answer to any political party’). This rhetorical distancing act may have undermined his ability to secure crucial PAC funds in early October, when he came within a point of Vance’s lead in the polling average, donors clearly sensed a gulf between Ohio Democrats and the bicoastal base. Though Ryan outraised Vance in donations and laid claim to 350,000 small donors, he was left trailing in contributions from his own party’s coffers. While Vance received $28 million from a Republican SuperPAC controlled by Mitch McConnell, his opponent was left to fundraise from labour organizations, small PACs, and ordinary voters. The Democratic Senate Majority PAC praised his ‘remarkably strong campaign’ but reportedly refused to donate a cent.  

Ryan compounded the damage to his campaign by failing to galvanize a younger generation of labour activists or match the tenor of fellow Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, who has won three elections to the Senate as a self-styled progressive populist. He could have created a favourable contrast with Vance by defending Ohio’s multiracial working-class (there are signs that Black and other minority turnout in Ohio is declining amid various Republican-devised voter suppression schemes) and emphasizing his social liberalism. But instead, Ryan simply doubled down on economic nationalism while giving it a Sinophobic edge. ‘China’s winning. Workers are losing’, he declared in an early campaign ad, claiming that securing US manufacturing dominance came down to a contest of ‘capitalism versus communism.’ It is hard to see what, if any, advantage may have been gained from reframing his pro-labor protectionism in Cold War terms of national security. In the end, the attempt to outflank Vance as a vociferous trade hawk merely conceded the terrain on which the campaign would be fought.

This strategy, along with Ryan’s persistent attacks on the ‘defund’ movement, also served to alienate the progressive base in urban constituencies. With neither the left nor the Democratic establishment firmly in his corner, Ryan struggled to cement a broad anti-Vance coalition. Winning 47% of the vote compared to Vance’s 53%, his performance conformed to general expectations: his support was concentrated in the reliably Democratic metropolitan areas of Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron and Toledo; he narrowly lost Mahoning County, part of his congressional district, where the small, distressed industrial city of Youngstown had one of the highest poverty rates in the country following the Great Recession. Having flipped only one county that Trump carried in the 2020 presidential election by the barest margin, Ryan did not meaningfully alter the state’s Democratic coalition nor its urban-rural divide. A redistricting process overseen by state Republicans following the 2020 census will implement new boundaries in 2023, intensifying gerrymanders that favour conservatives.

At a glance, the electoral map of Pennsylvania suggests that Fetterman was equally unable to reshape the Democratic constituency. The former factory towns and micropolitan locales that make up most of central Pennsylvania and its northern and southern borders voted decisively for Oz, while Fetterman dominated greater Philadelphia and Pittsburgh – the latter still a vital if diminished centre of heavy industry and advanced manufacturing, even as it has increasingly relied on growth in the healthcare and education sectors. Yet, from the New York Times to Jacobin, the near-unanimous assessment was that Fetterman improved prospects for progressives in the state, partly by breaking with the orthodoxies of Pennsylvania’s Democratic machine and spearheading a new electoral strategy. 

The leading concern for both Fetterman and Ryan was the unspoken need to regain the trust of white industrial workers and the working poor in regions outside of Democratic strongholds. Like Ryan, Fetterman emphasized the importance of domestic industry and unions to the economic revival of hard-bitten communities. Both backed the currently thwarted PRO Act and opposed ‘right-to-work’ laws that have spread in Republican-dominated states. And both adopted the economic argument that re-shoring supply chains would reduce inflation and consumer costs. The central plank of Fetterman’s platform, ‘Make More Stuff in America’, was yet another example of a Democrat telegraphing agreement with Trumpian trade policy, even as it was couched in terms meant to appeal to left-leaning audiences. On top of this, Fetterman echoed Ryan on China, attacking Oz for producing his campaign merchandise there and reiterating bullish arguments about American competitiveness. ‘I’ll always stand up to China and anyone who threatens the Union Way of Life’, he declared. ‘We know Oz won’t get tough on China.’

But whereas Ryan’s sabre-rattling cast him as a provincial and perhaps untrustworthy red state Democrat, Fetterman’s nationalistic rhetoric did not elicit the same criticism. On the contrary, a liberal-left coalition rallied behind the Pennsylvanian candidate in a rare show of unity, with an enthused core of national organizers – the same Senate Majority PAC that refused Ryan funneled $42 million into the election – who saw him as the key to winning back the target constituency of ‘non-college educated white working class’ voters.

What explained this variance? Political timing was a crucial factor. Back in the spring, Ryan had alienated key Democratic constituencies while Vance had simultaneously emerged as one of the strongest ultra-MAGA congressional candidates, making the race seem like a foregone conclusion. Fetterman, meanwhile, was boosted by the early mobilization around his insurgent primary campaign, in which he prevailed over the centrist Conor Lamb, and the subsequent recognition that the balance of power in the Senate would likely hinge on his performance. Since Pennsylvania, unlike Ohio, remains integral to the success of the Democratic presidential nominee in the Electoral College, the ramifications of an Oz victory were especially significant. In this context, the left seemed willing to tolerate or ignore Fetterman’s muscular expressions of ‘labour patriotism’ amid worrying signs that Oz was closing the polling gap during the final stretch of the campaign. Such high stakes made it easier for Fetterman to forge the coalition that eluded Ryan: progressives, stalwart Democrats, party elites and swing voters.

Of course, contingent elements also played a part in determining the outcomes in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Fetterman, aided by a savvy communications team attuned to the state’s challenging political terrain, defied speculation that the stroke would undermine his credibility and managed to sustain his momentum throughout the summer. In fact, his recovery fed into the underdog narrative which his campaign had begun crafting ever since the outset of the primary contest with Lamb. Whereas Fetterman was perceived as an insurgent outsider turned national politician, Ryan was viewed as an emblem of his party’s declining fortunes in the region. In both cases, the Democrats’ fragile position in these key manufacturing states set the tone of their campaigns. But while Fetterman translated this struggle-against-adversity into an electoral asset, Ryan was haunted by the apparent inevitability of defeat. This was partly due to the relative strength of their opponents, Vance being a far better political operator than the hapless Oz.

Fetterman’s success, however, does little to change the Democrats’ pattern of episodic victories and long-term structural weakness in the rustbelt. While Biden has committed to backstopping domestic industries, particularly the emerging renewables sector and advanced chip production, new plants are not opening at a war economy’s clip. Though there are promising signs of fixed investment in Ohio – encouraged, perhaps, by this past summer’s CHIPS Act as well as the American Rescue Plan and bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021 – this will not be enough to reverse decades of working-class dealignment and blue-collar animus toward the Democratic establishment. Future candidates may look to Fetterman as a model of pragmatic progressivism; but, as Ryan’s case shows, this is far from a straightforward election-winning formula. Indeed, with influential Democratic strategists and pundits now insisting that the metropolitan Sunbelt offers more opportunities to grow the Democratic base, Fetterman’s nostalgic affinity for industrial labour may turn out to be unrepresentative of the party’s overall direction. In either case, the Democrats will struggle to rebuild their regional power beyond the Northeast and West coast in the absence of a national programme capable of mobilizing progressive cadres as well as disaffected former supporters.  

Read on: Tom Mertes, ‘Hell with the Lid Off’, NLR 132.