There is no reason to believe that Zoomers will succeed where their predecessors failed. Their documented deficiencies, from ingrained asocial behavior and threadbare attention spans to plummeting literacy and organizational skills, are only likely to lead to graver defeats and regressions.

Indeed, what we understand to be politics is itself an echo of experiences that were already dated half a century ago: the pattern once set by the Boomers in May 1968 and Woodstock, which similarly created the impression of mass rupture, exemplified politics as pure event and image. The tragedy of our own time is that we have known nothing else. The older notion of politics as process, what Max Weber called the “slow boring” of coalitions and institutions, is the only kind that’s ever produced durable change. It still exists, but as the preserve of incumbent blocs: car dealerships and pharmaceutical corporations, liberal NGOs or free market think tanks. It is not the path encouraged by the memetic spaces where the Zoomer mind lives.

The younger and more plugged-in you are, the farther away you are from that antiquated paradigm. Gen Z’s revolutionary energies, therefore, are likely to be diffused into spectacle and simulacra before any meaningful institutional expression can be found. The Zoomer mind may believe it’s engaged in political acts; it may even precipitate big in-person rallies, the overthrow of a leader, or the radicalization of a party. But so long as politics is accessed primarily through screens, much like the Millennials, the new generation will find that their “movements” have about as much longevity and impact as a trend on X or TikTok.

And so, is there a way out of the pseudo-political (or “hyperpolitical”) doom loop handed down by the Boomers like an ancient curse? What exactly would a restoration of functional civil life look like, and could atomized Zoomers ever be entrusted with the task of bringing it about? The answers may have to be retrieved from one of the oldest sources of political thought, which should give a sense of just how radical a departure our contemporary status quo has been from the way political life has been conducted practically since the dawn of civilization.

In Politics, Aristotle observed that man is a zoon politkon, a “political animal” or, in some translations, “social animal”. He continued: “Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” For the better part of 2,000 years, the description was apt, capturing both the classical republican ideal of the virtuous citizen as naturally invested in the freedom of his polis, and the modern liberal notion of the rational individual who sought gain through trade and commerce. In both cases, human beings readily formed associations to pursue politics and common ends.

The history of modernity is littered with such associations, from the closed ranks of elites to the popular classes. There were colonial taverns and secret societies that fostered the age of revolution, and the business clubs, farmers’ granges, and trade unions that sustained class politics in the industrial era. The postwar years, too, were infused with a communitarian sheen through bowling leagues, wards, churches, and rotary clubs which now seem almost quaint and mythical to us.

Based in organic physical spaces, these organizations may have offered casual, fraternal atmospheres but were nonetheless governed by rules, codes, hierarchies. In other words, there was: regular proximity between real people in real places which built and preserved trust among political subjects; and an overall structure to give coherence to their individual and collective actions, filtering popular demands upward to the national level. One such group in the late 19th century, the Knights of Labor, was typical: as historian Robert H. Wiebe recounted in The Search for Order, they were “a collection of local associations designed partly to re-create and partly to protect a sense of community among its members”.

But then something happened in the late 20th century, or rather, a series of things combined to make that model of politics increasingly irrelevant. First, there was a change in the dominant values, from an emphasis on the group to the individual: there have always been Byrons and Shelleys and D’Annunzios, but as Tom Wolfe observed in the Seventies, even “the common man was… getting quite interested in this business of ‘realizing his potential as a human being’.”

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Arising from conditions of post-scarcity where basic survival needs were met by mass affluence, what might be called “the Boomer conception of liberty” would confound Benjamin Constant’s dichotomy. It expressed neither the ancients’ love of political self-determination nor the moderns’ preoccupation with economic self-interest: instead, it elevated self-expression as the highest imperative. Second, was the saturation of electronic media — social media and AI booms have only been the latest expression of a shift that is at least as old as television.

The digital world gave an outsized sense of “involvement”. Spectacular world events, such as postcolonial liberation struggles, conspiratorial mythologies, culture war crusades, and apocalyptic climate activism took on the form of visceral “happenings” and felt more politically “real” and compelling than whatever was happening in one’s own neighborhood or town square. It’s not that the underlying issues were unworthy of attention, but they engendered a low-stakes politics, more expressive than institutional. The flamboyant projection of identity mattered far more than the grinding work of coalition-building or structural material reform.

Consciousness was simultaneously individualized and globalized. As traditional mass spaces contracted, the ability to interact with one’s immediate, local institutions began to wither as well, emptying out those middle spheres between the self and society where Burke’s “little platoons” lived. Simple things like showing up to vote, attending meetings, and even just answering the phone have become dreadful, anxiety-inducing feats to many under thirties.

With their basic associative powers severely impaired, the young generations are now apparently so dependent on digital mediation that they can no longer engage in small talk. The famous “Gen Z stare” is an actual sociological symptom; they also have a deep-seated aversion to commitment (personal and institutional), and are thus prone to “ghosting” as a way of life. The same problem applies to their political affiliations. One need only to track the fate of such factions as the “vitalist Right” or the “post-Left” or “Effective Altruism” or “Postrationalism” to see how susceptible these are to debasement and dissipation.

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What we see today, Zoomers swinging between cynical nihilism and performative extremism and aestheticism, is the logical endpoint of our decades-long abdication of the real-world focal points of politics. And what makes this turn particularly pernicious is the material context: the anti-politics of self-expression may have been decadent from the start, but at least it made some sense when the Boomers were young and the West still had industrial growth and an upwardly mobile middle class. Zoomer (and Millennial) living standards have been in dramatic decline relative to what their parents had: in other words, post-scarcity is over, inequality is resurgent, and the case for a return to a sober, practical materialist politics has never been more urgent.

But where past generations of displaced farmers or workers were able to wield their associative powers and form alliances as a natural response to economic hardship, the younger generations today have no such option. They are so radically fragmented in their habits and dispositions that they are unable to advance their own self-interest as a bloc, even as they deeper sink into immiseration.

Yet the problem is, of course, not reducible to individual attitudes, but to the whole informational architecture of 21st-century life. Even if Zoomers want to break out of the digital realm and “live in the moment”, any intervention has to be at a large enough scale to truly matter: not gradual shifts in personal consumer choices, but broad countermovements that aim to be every bit as sweeping as the original wave of social distortion wrought by the titans of Big Tech, some of whom make no secret of their disdain for the human race.

The return of politics in the Aristotelian sense can only come through dramatic measures: whether through winding down the attention economy as a viable profit-making model and/or through a moment of major cultural renewal in which face-to-face interactions become the sine qua non of being and belonging in a human society. Efforts like “Delete Day” and “Retro Tech” should only be the start; these have to be able to expand and mature into a comprehensive alternative vision of the good life beyond our present app-induced, anti-social stagnation. For there can be no real politics without sociability, which alone can revive the trust and coherence needed for any new generational regime to take hold. After all, how can one form coalitions with people who can’t coalesce? Fixing this is the prerequisite to everything else.

One strains to even imagine what the Zoomer equivalent to the old “smoke-filled rooms” could look like, or how a serious, nationwide Zoomer interest group could function without devolving into trash and brainrot. But until such a moment comes as young people are able to gather regularly in analog spaces and feel the heat of each other’s breaths, there can be only the simulacrum of politics, not its substance.

Founded by the French, at the end of the 19th century, Belvedere Park feels like an appropriate spot to reflect on how much changes here — and how little. In 2009, after all, long-term dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ran for his fifth term as president. A year later, he was gone, ousted in the Arab Spring’s first successful revolution. 

Yet soon enough, another despot would come and take his place. Today, Kais Saied is running for his second term as president, one of only two approved candidates. As in 2009, the results are largely a foregone conclusion, with Tunisians expected to vote for a man who’s tightened his grip on their lives. Between political clampdowns and the suppression of criticism, no wonder many Tunisians fear a repeat of Ben Ali’s iron rule. 

Not that the situation is completely hopeless. For as the Saied regime goes through the motions of democracy, and the economy wheezes on, Tunisians young and old fight to save something of their country’s Arab Spring, even if it may not be enough to banish the winter they now find themselves in. 

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Contemporary Tunisian politics can really be traced back to 14 July 2011. That Friday, Ben Ali dissolved his government and declared a state of emergency. A few hours later, he fled to Saudi Arabia, and the Tunisian people rejoiced. “We all bet our lives on 14 January!” is how Benabdallah puts it, recalling the massive street protests that forced Ben Ali into exile. 

Yet just like other risings in Syria and Egypt, these happy memories would be crushed. For Benabdallah, the root of Tunisia’s problems can be summarised in a single word: Ennahda. A moderate Islamist movement, it dominated Tunisian politics in the years after 2011, and was a leading party in every post-revolutionary government until 2019. But though its name means “renaissance” in Arabic, Benabdallah says Ennahda ruled “without a vision” for Tunisia’s future. 

That, Benabdallah continues, paved the way for Kais Saied’s landslide victory in the 2019 poll. “Ennahda produced the environment we’re in nowadays”, Benabdallah explains, arguing that while the Islamists claimed to be building Tunisian democracy, they in practice privileged short-term stability over proper reform in areas such as social justice and graft. Certainly, Saied’s remarkable rise reflects widespread disillusionment with the post-2011 political order, not least around the bread-and-butter economic issues that caused the revolution to start with.

But if Saied promised an anti-corruption drive before he entered office, under his rule the authorities have carried out waves of arrests, aimed at everyone from opposition groups to journalists. 

Even so, the President still benefits from public discontent with the political elite, widely perceived as corrupt and incompetent. Saied’s own background surely helps here. A former law professor, some Tunisians continue to see him as a man of integrity, even as others continue to admire his supposed status as a political outsider. “Tunisians were fed up with parties,” concedes Najla Kodia, a member of the socialist Al Qotb party. “Saied seized the opportunity to initiate his putsch, and now he doesn’t want to give up his power.”

This context has become especially urgent over recent years. In the summer of 2021, amid a deepening economic crisis, Saied suspended parliament and took executive control of the country. A year later, he pushed through a new constitution granting himself almost unlimited power to rule by decree. Over just three years, then, he’s built a new hyper-presidential system and dismantled the liberal institutions established back in 2011.

The dire state of Tunisian democracy is clear everywhere you look. Freedom of expression, for instance, has shrunk. Promulgated in January 2019, Decree 54 allows the state to curtail independent voices under the cover of combating cybercrime. More than 70 political activists, lawyers, journalists and human-rights defenders have been arrested or prosecuted this way since the end of 2022. 

As the election approaches, meanwhile, repression has become even more shameless. The media is gagged and judicial independence attacked, even as politicians are detained or prosecuted. Consider the case of Ayachi Zammel, a presidential candidate who nonetheless just received a hefty jail term for allegedly falsifying voter endorsements. That’s before you consider those 14 presidential contenders disqualified from running by Tunisia’s electoral commission, a body whose members are now nominated directly by President Saied.

In another unprecedented step, and just two weeks before Sunday’s presidential vote, Kais Saied even ordered parliament to amend the electoral law and strip the administrative court of its oversight authority. The tweak, which was adopted by the legislature last Friday, directly threatens the role of the judiciary in maintaining the integrity of an election process. 

If Saied had managed to improve Tunisia’s ailing economy, this looming dictatorship might have mattered less. As it is, the erstwhile academic has struggled to improve on Ennahda’s record. “The ruling elite in all these years has been responsible for not changing the economic model as it should have done”, explains Nafaa Laribi, a human rights lawyer, with Saied and his fellow politicians all failing to open Tunisia’s creaking state-run economy to private investment.  

In practice, these problems are clear across a range of metrics. For one thing, inflation remains high. For another, unemployment hovers at 15%. Growth, for its part, is stagnant, even as foreign debt hovered at about 90% of GDP in 2022. Food prices, already squeezed by the war in Ukraine, rose by almost 12% last year, while basic goods such as flour remain in short supply too. All told, half of public sector spending is now spent on the public payroll — leaving precious little for health, infrastructure and social services. No wonder Tunisia’s credit rating has slumped, making access to international markets even harder.

Squeezed between economic turmoil and a rising police state, what remains of Tunisia’s civil society has rallied. As politicians and activists caught wind of the amendment to the electoral law, the newly formed Tunisian Network for Rights and Freedoms staged a protest on 22 September, the sequel to another one the previous week. I watched as hundreds marched down Habib Bourguiba Avenue in central Tunis, chanting and shouting as they went. 

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But here too, history lies heavy. Beyond the usual anti-government banners, after all, the protesters equally tried to place their unhappiness within the broader revolutionary tradition, hardly surprising when Habib Bourguiba Avenue once served as the focal point of the 2011 protests. “The people want the fall of the regime!” protesters sang, evoking a cry made famous in Cairo and Damascus during those heady spring days in 2011. 

Kodia, for her part, makes a similar link between the past and the present. “This amendment is another attempt to remove an institution that has dared to challenge the authority,” she says of the new electoral law, raising her voice as the crowd cheers around her. “And these elections are a façade — Kais Saied will take power by force once more.” 

Beyond Leftists like Kodia, friends and relatives of political detainees attended the rally too. One journalist held a photo of Mourad Zeghidi, a legendary reporter arrested in May on vague speech charges. Nearby, I met Souhaieb Ferchichi, a campaigner for the I-Watch rights group, who dismissed a government that “scapegoats” food speculators and black migrants for its own failings. 

Ferchichi is clearly determined to keep fighting, something he shares with younger Tunisians too. “Kais Saied thinks he sits on a throne and wants to stay there for his life,” says a student called Ines, who attended the demonstration with a friend. “We want to encourage more people to stop falling into fear, and open their eyes to this situation.”

Clearly, then, not every Tunisian is resigned to Saied’s rule. But can chanting and marching hope to displace him? Aymen Zaghdoudi is sceptical. “Tunisia,” suggests the academic and human rights expert, “is on the brink of going back to the pre-2011 era.” Quite aside from the ominous similarities between Saied and Ben Ali, Zaghdoudi points out that the opposition is just too “scattered” to be effective. Benabdallah agrees. “The mobilisation is there,” he says, “but it’s a scattered minority of people coming from very different camps.” A fair point: between Islamists and secularists, socialists and liberals, Tunisian politics is riven by factionalism.

Beyond these ideological cleavages, other observers point to the relative weakness of the country’s civil society, yet another consequence of Tunisia’s past. “The democratic transition was left unfinished because it didn’t succeed in creating solid political and independent institutions that would resist any kind of drift”, says Romdhane Ben Amor of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, noting that terrorist attacks and political assassinations stymied mature institutions alongside roiling economic turmoil. 

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Yet if Zaghdoudi says the result of today’s election is “likely known” in advance, he does retain some optimism. With the official opposition split, he nonetheless believes the Tunisian Network for Rights and Freedoms has the potential to unite civil society, not merely in its hatred of the president but also in formulating a broader vision for Tunisia’s cultural and economic future. 

Change is surely needed. Tunisia, after all, is floundering. On a downtown street in Tunis, I watched unemployed young men sitting outside cafes, smoking and scrolling through their phones. Informal vendors were there too, waiting for buyers, as stinking bags of rubbish dotted the pavements. In two supermarkets I visited, supplies of sugar, semolina and coffee were all dwindling on the shelves. Milk and rice were nowhere to be found. 

For those with long enough memories, these conditions feel eerily similar to those in 2010, just before Tunisia was enveloped by revolution alongside the rest of the Arab world. To put it differently, then, and even if he does romp to victory tomorrow, President Saied should surely be careful. As Ferchichi warns: “We once revolted against a dictator. We’re ready to do it again today, tomorrow, in the years to come.” 

Not that Belvedere Park felt particularly revolutionary when I visited. At one point in our conversation, Benabdallah and I pass a pond, a place he remembers as a child. Back then, it teemed with ducks and fish. Now, though, the basin sits empty — and Benabdallah can’t help but joke. “Even they have had enough.”

But then a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire at repeated abuse from the police, and the Arab Spring began. Ferjani and his family knew they had to return. Four months later, they finally did.

“It was completely and utterly amazing to me,” he remembers. “Tunisia had changed. What first struck me was something that might seem odd: there were garbage strikes everywhere. People were refusing to pick up the garbage because they were not being paid enough. That, to me, was symptomatic of a new day.”

Almost 12 years later, these words seem almost forlorn. If the yearning for Arab democracy began in Tunisia, it looks like it might finally have ended there, too, when last week the Tunisian President Kais Saied held a referendum that effectively cancelled democracy in the country.

Saied — more commonly known as Kais — has been President since October 2019. He is, in a mordant irony, a retired law professor who initially campaigned on a platform to allow citizens to recall elected officials, while claiming that many of the country’s problems came from widespread disregard of the country’s “many constitutional laws”.

But just under three years later, on 25 July, in a referendum he simply ordered (he’s been ruling by decree since July 2021), voters granted him full executive control of the country, supreme command of the army and the ability to appoint a government without the consent of parliament. Fewer than a third of voters turned out, but of those who did, 94.6% voted for a series of expanded powers that also weaken the judiciary and remove checks on the powers of the presidency. All in all, it’s what we might legitimately call a democratic coup.

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When Ferjani returned to Tunisia, his father Said was one of those given the job of mediating the peaceful move to elections in 2011, or as Ferjani puts it, “negotiating the country’s way into democracy”. In another irony, sinister this time, the first people Said had to deal with were the same who had been involved in his torture in 1987. “It was necessary: he needed to help create a sense that there would be laws protecting the transition — that it wouldn’t just be a free for all,” Ferjani tells me. “And to that extent, I think my father did something that he should be proud of, because the situation didn’t escalate into street killings or acts of vengeance or anything like that, which was what so many people feared would happen.”

If that was a high point, it didn’t last for long. The new government soon found it hard to provide for the enlarged expectations of its citizenry. People began to feel they weren’t being represented. The new 2014 constitution — the explicit goal of which was to “build the state, for freedom from tyranny, responding to its free will, and to achieve the objectives of the revolution for freedom and dignity” — was not properly implemented.

Alongside these failures of governance was an explosion of disinformation in the media and online, particularly on Facebook. A favoured target was Nabil Karoui, a media mogul and candidate in the 2019 presidential elections, who was accused of hiring a Mossad agent to lobby for him in DC, which led to widespread accusations that he was an Israeli plant.

Into this chaos walked Kais — “an unremarkable teacher at university,” according to Ferjani — who was also a longstanding conservative who believed homosexuality was a conspiracy wrought by foreign powers. But he had one advantage. He was, quite simply, someone who could appeal to everybody. He spoke the language of nationalism to the Arab nationalists; of Islamism to the Islamists; and of law and change to the youth. In the end, everyone saw him as someone who was different — the change the country so desperately needed.

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Once in power, Kais began to speak out against anyone who might feasibly check his authority, especially the judiciary. He was always hinting at near-invisible, conspiratorial forces that were undermining the government and the rights of ordinary Tunisians. On 25 July 2021, he dissolved parliament and sacked the Prime Minister in the face of mass protests after years of government paralysis, corruption and a worsening economy. He has ruled by decree ever since.

In February, he dissolved the country’s Supreme Judicial Council, accusing it of bias. The council rejected his decision, saying in a statement that “it would continue carrying out its duties”. The move struck at the heart of Tunisia’s legal system because the council is charged with ensuring the independence of its judiciary. If it wasn’t clear before that Kais had abandoned even the pretence of being a democratic leader, there is no doubt about it now.

“We have seen a ruler undermine every single democratic institution that was built by Tunisian people following their careful development post-revolution,” says Rashad Ali, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Even worse, he explains, “European democracies have stood by, watched, or at times tacitly supported these regressive measures.”

Ferjani agrees. “Right now, it’s up in the air. There’s even been pressure to concede the referendum result because of fears for stability and threats of violence in the streets.” On 28 July, just days after the referendum, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concerns that “Tunisia has experienced an alarming erosion of democratic norms over the past year and reversed many of the Tunisian people’s hard-won gains since 2011.” In response, through a statement on the presidential Facebook page, Kais affirmed “the independence of the national decision and his rejection of any form of interference in national affairs” and declared the “only voice is the voice of the people”.

Ferjani claims that the response to these words from European capitals was “mealy-mouthed”, which has only emboldened Kais. He sees EU powers as partly culpable for recent events in Tunisia. “The EU,” he says, “is part of the reason for the return of autocracy in Tunisia.”

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According to Ali, events in Tunisia now pose a danger to the whole continent. “Safeguarding democracy and democratic values and supporting those fighting for it is in Europe’s interest and recent events in Ukraine have shown the dangers of allowing regressive and authoritarian politics any foothold within or around European frontiers,” he concludes.

There are clear things that the Europeans can do. First, as the Blinken episode revealed, Kais Saeed and his inner circle are sensitive to messaging. Holding them to account in terms of their failure to meet democratic standards, not normalising claims that what is unfolding is democratic, is key. EU powers must therefore accept that the parliamentary elections coming this December will not be fair, rather than bolster the absurd government claims that they will be a democratic step which aids Kais enormously.

Second, they must ring-fence aid and tie it to enhanced scrutiny of Kais’s inner circle and Tunisia’s tender process. At present there is no real way of checking that the money earmarked for helping Tunisians, and ensuring the economy doesn’t collapse, is going to the right place. The finances of Kais and his inner circle need to be investigated and the results properly communicated, so that policy makers in donor states are aware of where the money is actually going. Not least because Kais and his inner circle are always blaming outsiders for the country’s financial problems.

And finally, they should be unequivocally supportive of the Tunisian voices opposing Kais. In the end, Ferjani’s message is simple: “If Europe wants help Tunisia, it needs to admit publicly that it is no longer a democracy.”

It’s common in European capitals to lament the curdling of the Arab Spring into winter; less common is to hear the same lament for multiple failings of EU governments. Most of what happened during those revolutions across the Middle East was and is obviously beyond their control. But the case of Tunisia shows that when you are content only to mouth the platitudes of democracy, you not only fail to support it but end up enabling its opposite: autocracy. In the end, while the diplomats in Brussels and Berlin sleep and dine in comfort, it is the people on the ground who suffer, as they always do.

Mbeki, it must be said immediately, has his own form. During his 1999-2008 form, he disbanded the country’s highly effective anti-corruption special task team, The Scorpions, when it was getting close to the criminal activities of some senior ANC members (including the National Police Commissioner). He introduced a state-sanctioned system of race-based extortion of wealth and opportunity under the guise of black empowerment, ushered in a new era of political cronyism, and gave rise to a new and truly avaricious economic elite, a multi-tentacled screen of parasites through which little national wealth percolates to the masses.

In The Mbeki Legacy, I labelled Mbeki a de-moderniser, for the simple reason that through ideological misdirection, he severely weakened the country’s institutional capacity, something the entirely malignant former president Jacob Zuma later took full advantage of to create his gangster state. Yet it would be unwise to ignore this attack from a cantankerous 80-year-old ex-president on the basis that a pot should not call a kettle black. It comes at a time of acute fragility in the life of the presidency, ruling party and nation — and has found wide resonance across racial lines. It is the stuff on which history sometimes hinges.

President Ramaphosa, once hailed as the modernising saviour of the country after the depredations of his predecessor, has not turned the country away from its trajectory towards a failed state. Institutional collapse is obvious in many state and para-state institutions and physical infrastructure is dire. Those citizens who can afford to have turned to private suppliers of health care, security and education. Going off-grid is now a staple of dinner conversation. Recognising the danger of a collapse of the national energy grid, Ramaphosa has belatedly sought support from private energy producers, primarily renewables.

In short, for many years now the country has already been undergoing an Arab Spring of its own as people take charge of their own communities: sometimes orderly, often chaotically and occasionally violently. The feuding ANC and its bankrupt state apparatus have lost real influence in the lives of ordinary citizens: so much so that an organisation called Afriforum, initially an Afrikaner civil rights group but now enjoying wide support across all race groups because of its feisty legal defence of wronged citizens, has stated its intention to make communities “state-proof”, ending their reliance on state-provided services.

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All of this is a direct consequence of Ramaphosa’s refusal to reverse the core drivers of collapse and the enablers of corruption: race-based economic empowerment policies, inappropriate state appointments, expensive social welfare programmes, land seizures and a culture of impunity at all levels of state and elected office.

Perhaps more terminally, Ramaphosa’s integrity itself is now at stake. A bizarre incident, mischievously exposed by Zuma’s former head of State Security, himself accused of corruption, has emerged about hundreds of thousands of dollar bills (perhaps millions) being stolen from the President’s bush lodge two years ago. The theft, confirmed by Ramaphosa, was apparently not recorded by the police and the villains were pursued secretly by state intelligence agencies and bounty hunters in a bid to recover the loot.

Ramaphosa has thus far refused to give his version of this Netflix-type drama: typically, he hides behind a ponderous police inquiry to avoid having to personally deal with the criminals in his party. For years there has been little doubt about the President’s inability to control his cabinet, parliamentary caucus, party and country. But now not even his holiday home?

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Last weekend, he finally lost control of the ANC KwaZulu Region, the largest bloc in his party and the strongest supporter of the ousted KwaZulu-based Jacob Zuma. The new grouping is largely pro-Zuma and headed by Siboniso Duma, a young and energetic man, who voted for Ramaphosa in the 2017 party elections but now, perhaps exasperated, has turned to the rebel and indeed insurrectionist faction grouped around Zuma.

None of this was entirely surprising. The Zulu traditionalists who make up a large part of the provincial ANC constituency have taken badly the usurpation of their man, Zuma, three years ago. The majority believe Ramaphosa is manipulating the legal system to persecute his opponents within the party. The province itself has been buffeted by a violent but failed insurrection in July last year, devastating 60-year floods, rampant politico-criminal gangs a la Sicily or Colombia, best-of-breed state corruption and high unemployment following the pandemic.

In the face of this growing crisis, President Ramaphosa, now widely and cruelly dubbed Cyril The Silent, has done virtually nothing more than offer trite homilies, anodyne solutions and occasional bunches of money. The people gathered at the ANC Conference, then, represented both the architects and the victims of their own misfortune. Either way, they have had enough of Ramaphosa.

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Wenzeni uZuma (What has Zuma done?), the delegates to the regional conference in Durban sang when Ramaphosa arrived, a rather surprising question given the complex and wide range of criminal proceedings now underway against the 80-year-old Zuma. The conference also moved that the party’s “Step Aside” rule, requiring elected officials charged in criminal court to step down, should itself step aside. That something so glaringly right and necessary should be contested is a measure of how far the provincial party has drifted from modern tradition and how much they distrust Ramaphosa.

But the loss of KwaZulu Natal support will not necessarily end Ramaphosa’s bid for a second term as ANC Leader at the elective conference in December this year. He seems to have the other regions pretty much on side despite, perhaps because of, KwaZulu Natal’s bolshy stand. But the tumult, this further example of Cyril The Silent’s inability to control his party, certainly affects the ANC’s chance of retaining power in the 2024 general elections.

The consensus view is that the ANC will not win a majority, opening the way for a novel coalition-based form of government. The optimists foresee the prospect of a resurgent modernising coalition, perhaps including reformist elements of the ANC, the sort that Big Business had hoped Ramaphosa would deliver when they massively invested in his campaign for ANC leader in 2017 but did not get. The numbers from the municipal elections this year in which the ANC lost heavily, support this possibility.

The pessimists foresee things being pretty much the same after 2024: the ANC in alliance with like-minded groups, just more and different fingers in the till, a continuation of South Africa’s shambling march to irrelevance. The incorrigible simply do not believe the ANC would vacate office if voted out.

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With all this looming, Mbeki’s reference to the Arab Spring is intriguing. Then, Arab despots were thrown out by a popular democratic uprising. Despite the limitless optimism of Western liberalism, most of the countries subsequently relapsed into either civil war or a re-engineered authoritarianism. All South Africans can do is pray that in 2024 they get the first part without the latter.

Ultimately, it may not matter much who governs South Africa. The existential threat faced by the country is the terrifying loss of skills, much of it driven out by the ANC’s affirmative action policies. Collapsed state training and educational institutions cannot introduce black candidates at sufficient a rate. There is the rub.

Yet South Africans are by and large a patient people. Even their rage tends to be expressed through activist forums, marches and legal channels. The prospects of a general insurrection, an Arab Spring, are thus limited. After all, the nation had that chance in July last year when KwaZulu Natal and parts of Gauteng burnt. It remained quiescent.

But without a competent state the nation will devolve into communal zones. The rich will live well. The poor will endure. The gaps will grow. This cantonising of the country is already happening and it is still largely around apartheid-era geographical divisions. The threat is therefore not popular uprising but decay: social, economic, political and cultural, just like the old days.

The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi appeared to have been provoked by the vegetable and apple-cart trader’s humiliation by officials in Tunis. Though some of the details are disputed, the 26-year-old clearly came up against the sclerotic implacability which dogged the economic opportunities of people like him in Tunisia under its then leader, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

The wounds he suffered at his own hands on 17 December 2010 led to Bouazizi being hospitalised, but he died a fortnight later. By then wider Tunisian society was in revolt. The humiliations which had led Bouazizi to his extreme act were clearly shared by large numbers of his fellow countrymen. As anyone who knows North Africa can attest, such frustrations are almost inevitable in societies where achieving the most basic of things requires a labyrinthine process demanding the patience of a prophet, if not a saint.

As the protests in Tunisia grew so they were replicated across the rest of North Africa and eventually across the Middle East. The Ben Ali government was eventually overthrown, giving huge impetus to the populations of other countries keen to get rid of their own corrupt, inefficient and previously apparently immovable leaders.

Next door in Libya the uprising of a portion of the population against Colonel Gaddafi was met with predictable brutality by the dictator. Expecting a massacre of Gaddafi’s opponents in Benghazi an alliance of outside powers – including the UK and France — were persuaded to intervene. The result was Gaddafi’s rule ending in rather bloodier circumstances than Ben Ali, the sinking of Libya into civil war and the breaking of decades of uncomfortable compromise agreements with the regime; sordid agreements which had largely prevented illegal migration flows from the Libyan coastline across the Mediterranean to the soft underbelly of Europe.

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America's divisions will only get worse

By Douglas Murray

Over in Syria anti-government protests picked up their own momentum. Outspoken opposition to the Assad regime was supressed with a brutality which Gaddafi would have admired, and here the protests soon splintered and the country descended swiftly into civil war. One of the actors that stepped into the resulting vacuum was the Islamist group ISIS, who declared a caliphate across a huge portion of Syria and northern Iraq. Soon people were fleeing the country by the millions, to refugee camps in neighbouring Jordan and Turkey, but also for the more desirable destination of Europe.

Today you can still hear some people claiming that European intervention in some way caused the migrant crisis of the mid-2010s (a subject which is one focus of my 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam). But this is a simplistic and Western-centric interpretation of events. True, the intervention of the Western powers in Libya tilted the balance of force in the conflict against Gaddafi. But until the rise of ISIS (when they had very specific business to attend to) the Western powers — notably the United States — played a distinctly hands-off role in the civil war in Syria: a war which has to date claimed the lives of as many as half a million people.

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So the view that Western meddling in the region somehow caused the migration crisis is a selective interpretation of events. The intervention in Libya, and the now traditional inability of the interventionists to unify and secure the country in the period immediately after military action, undoubtedly made the Libyan coastline a hive for people smugglers to begin successfully practising their trade in human beings.

But the non-intervention in Syria ensured that when that tragic country fell apart the people had no safe havens from the evils of Assad and the Islamic State, and millions understandably fled. Once that movement began and European leaders started to relax their border and asylum policies, people from a bewildering number of other countries joined in the movement. Soon the Syrian refugee crisis became a Middle East, central Asian, North and sub-Saharan African refugee crisis.

By the middle of the decade, five years after Bouazizi had set himself on fire in Tunis, there were new regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, almost no governance in Libya, and a regime fighting to their last benighted subject to stay in power in Syria. Across the rest of the region, from Morocco to Bahrain, governments that wished to survive had to make accommodations or perpetrate actions which in any usual season would have seen them condemned forcefully. But in a time of flux, as the Arab Spring became the Arab Winter — and as the warning of Syria stared at the world every day — all status quo arrangements in such countries took on a patina of appeal they had not enjoyed in decades.

The political instability did, however, move north, where the arrival of migrants primarily into Italy and Greece caused a political panic of a kind not seen in Europe this century. States like Germany and Sweden, which positively welcomed in the new arrivals by the hundreds of thousands if not millions, soon struggled to cope with the consequences of their own policy of invitation.

Neighbouring countries like Denmark and Hungary, which had not asked for these huge numbers of people to walk into — or over — their territory, started to look like they were going in a different political direction entirely. Fault lines began to grow not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but in Europe, too.

Some states, especially in central and eastern Europe, objected to being expected to pick up the human or financial costs of a policy decided in Berlin and Brussels. On the European shores of the Mediterranean a sullenness grew, borne out of a perfectly reasonable aggravation that the northern European states were advocating policies which on a financial and humanitarian level their southern neighbours were left struggling to cope with.

After all, nobody arrived directly into Germany from the Middle East. They arrived into Mediterranean countries which were already struggling through the fiscal restraints imposed upon them in the wake of the eurozone crises. Countries with stagnant economies were now being asked to welcome in the world’s poor as well as dispossessed. And nobody seemed to know whether — if ever — there would be an end to the policy.

To the farthest side of Europe from the places where the migrants were arriving, the British public saw all this at an important juncture, just as they were being asked to decide whether or not to remain a part of the European Union. When the public voted to leave in 2016 they were propelled by a large number of long-simmering reasons, but one of the final propulsions was the sight of a Europe awash with the consequences of border policies unilaterally announced from Berlin and complained about almost everywhere else. One-by-one the countries of the EU instituted their own border policies and in June 2016 the British public used the ballot box to declare a new one of their own.

But further away still from the seat of the crisis, the Arab spring and the rise of ISIS would arguably help to bring about an even greater seismic event in the world’s greatest power; with massacres in Paris and elsewhere in 2015, American voters turned to a candidate who appeared more suited to a dangerous world.

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Today the splits exposed in 2015 have grown ever greater. Only recently, Hungary and Poland resisted a new emergency budget until it became clear that their countries would not have their refugee policy dictated by Brussels. After a terrorist attack in Austria in October the German and Austrian chancellors were once again in public contestation over migrant quotas thought up in Berlin. One event was a reminder that 2015 would not be forgotten; another a reminder that Europe is never more than a few atrocities away from the political bands breaking again.

It is far too early to say what any of this means. The 2010s began with pundits trying to work out what the Arab Spring was. Was it the region’s 1848? Its 1914? Its 1989? Was it one or all of these things? Who knows? What we do know — or should observe — is that the decade shows the impossibility of political predictions.

We are used to the metaphor of the butterfly flapping its wings. What we may still be uncomfortable with — and always should be — is the chain of causality that means that an upset apple-cart in a Tunisian market-place can cause not just governments to tremble, but governments far away — in democracies and dictatorships alike — to fall. It is magnificent for any historian to study. And humbling, if not terrifying, for anyone who believes that human affairs can be much predicted, let alone guided.

Within states and in the relations between them, as in individuals, the coronavirus searches out and exacerbates the underlying morbidities, exaggerating them until total system failure. When the international system collapses, it will be with Covid, and not of it.

The greatest morbidity the virus has latched onto in the global order is the rivalry between the United States and China. This contest is not new — International Relations scholars have long debated the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ named after the agonising and destructive struggle between Athens and Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian, wherein a rising power is inexorably drawn into conflict with the hegemon it displaces.

When Germany challenged British hegemony at the beginning of the last century, the first wave of globalisation ended in global conflict and then a pandemic; we must hope that this current pandemic, rapidly bringing about the end of the second wave of globalisation, will not similarly end in confrontation between the two great powers.

In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win.

Trump’s much-touted withdrawal from the Middle East has likewise seen the US bolster its forces in the region with tens of thousands more troops than his term began with, and allowed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to pursue a burning fixation with regime change in Iran that is unlikely to end in America’s favour.

America has frittered away 5 trillion dollars on its Middle Eastern adventures, indebting itself to China in the process, and burned its domestic and international political capital to an unimaginable degree —with nothing at all to show for it. Now that the architects of this self-inflicted catastrophe wish us to join them in their next global adventure, we must think carefully.

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By Aris Roussinos

Let’s remember how we got here. Only a couple of months ago, warning about dependence on China and the fragility of our supply chains, and urging decoupling from the aspiring hegemon, was viewed as the preserve of cranks of Right and Left, considered romantic at best and xenophobic at worst.

When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions.

The result is the total discrediting of the US-led order, an order of which China’s rise is as much a direct product as it is a challenge.

The truth is that globalisation, the central political dream of Clinton and Blair, Obama and Cameron, was never real. It was a process by which advanced Western economies unilaterally surrendered their manufacturing capacity to a rival, growing power, China, which instead of reciprocating according to the Panglossian calculations of the neoliberal theorists, practiced a traditional and ruthless mercantilism in pursuit of its own interests. As the American political theorist Michael Lind recently wrote in Tablet:

“Politicians pushing globalization like Clinton may have told the public that the purpose of NAFTA and of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was to open the closed markets of Mexico and China to ‘American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.’ But U.S. multinationals and their lobbyists 20 years ago knew that was not true. Their goal from the beginning was to transfer the production of many products from American soil to Mexican soil or Chinese soil, to take advantage of foreign low-wage, nonunion labor, and in some cases foreign government subsidies and other favors.”

The idea that a global liberal order could, like an iPhone, be designed in America and made in China was the product, where it was sincerely held, of pure ideological delusion. In its entire 5,000 year history, China has not spent one single day as a liberal democracy. The belief that a repressive autocratic regime would suddenly transform into a liberal democracy by being handed more wealth and power was patently absurd. Yet it is the people who held and promoted this claim for decades who intend to lead the world into a great power confrontation — against the China for whose rise they are directly responsible.

Globalisation was always the grand illusion of naive liberalism, taken advantage of by illiberal and non-liberal actors to pursue their own ends. It is the liberals, the TINA bluechecks, who are the artless rubes in this story. Indeed, it is they who deserve much of the blame now being directed at China. In Lind’s words:

“The United States has not been the naive victim of cunning Chinese masterminds. On the contrary, in the last generation many members of America’s elite have sought to get rich personally by selling or renting out America’s crown jewels—intellectual property, manufacturing capacity, high-end real estate, even university resources—to the elite of another country. When asked whether the rapid dismantling, in a few decades, of much of an industrial base built up painstakingly over two centuries has been bad for the United States, the typical reply by members of the U.S. establishment is an incoherent word salad of messianic liberal ideology and neoclassical economics. We are fighting global poverty by employing Chinese factory workers for a pittance! Don’t you understand Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage?”

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Get ready for Fortress Europe

By Aris Roussinos

For a brief few decades, the shift in production to China made a handful of Western individuals unimaginably rich, while lowering the living standards of the middle and working class. It began to turn the First World into a Third World society of stratified, vastly uneven wealth even as it raised China into a First World superpower. For the benefit of a few billionaires, Western societies have immiserated their voter base, dramatically weakened themselves, and helped shorten the lives of hundreds of thousands of their own people.

These events didn’t just happen. Factories didn’t just uproot themselves and migrate to China like flocks of concrete geese. These were conscious, willed acts presented to us as faits accomplis — which we must now consciously and painfully undo, in full historical awareness of how this all took place.

It was in winning the first Cold War that the United States set the stage for its own eclipse, though our own entanglement in this mess is the product of the Second World War. In 1945, the United States found itself the victor through its possession of a vast industrial base, sheltered by geography from the destruction we European powers had wrought upon ourselves. The Soviet Union could not keep up with America’s industrial power, able to churn out both weapons and consumer goods with dizzying speed and sophistication.

Yet when the rival superpower collapsed, exhausted, the United States took the wrong lessons from the fall of communism. American policymakers convinced themselves their global dominance was due to the success of their liberal ideology rather than of their industrial might, and that the sudden, unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union was due to the vindication of liberalism rather than of the awakened nationalism of Russia’s subject peoples.

Drunk on victory, and searching for a new project, American policymakers decided to remake the world in their own image. In 1993, the National Security Strategy of US National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher melded the doctrine of imperial hegemony with the free market orthodoxies that had taken root in the Reagan era. As the realist International Relations scholar Patrick Porter notes:

“Christopher’s version assumed that the United States ‘must maintain its military strength’, ‘stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’, and ‘knock down barriers to global trade’. Lake’s premise was that ‘America’s power, authority, and example provide unparalleled opportunities to lead,’ that its security rested on the rise of market democracy abroad.”

Our present moment, in all its dangers, results from this fusion of the two strands of liberalism at the very apogee of American power: the belief that the unfettered free movement of goods, capital, services and people would raise global living standards to endless new heights, and that it was America’s manifest destiny to oversee a worldwide liberal order of free trade and unchallenged US hegemony.

Distractedly giving away the industrial base that won them the first Cold War to their rival in the second, American administrations of both parties plunged headfirst into the post-historical future. It took less than a decade for reality to crash into the World Trade Center, but by then it was too late. America’s policymakers had been captured by their grand delusion, and they refused to let it go even as the empire found itself over-extended in war after war, entered into with noble liberal aims utterly divorced from reality, and from which it was unable to extricate itself.

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Just one decade after 9/11, despite America’s mauling in Iraq, pious liberals saw in the Arab Spring a chance to spread their creed to oppressed masses crying out for liberal democracy, and watched with confused horror as the armed factions of the Middle East turned instead to the older and more powerful forces of religious fervour, ethnic conflict and sectarian hatred. Lost in a fantasy world of their own imagining, Americans could not begin to understand the world they dreamed of changing.

America’s rapid rise to global hegemony and equally rapid decline is a grand historical tragedy of the highest order, and as in classical tragedy, the root cause is the protagonist’s central character flaw. Born of 18^th-century liberal ideals, and centred on a sacred set of texts, a constitution and declaration of independence debated with rabbinical exactitude and religious fervour, for the United States, that flaw is its civic religion of liberalism.

While we at least, like our neighbours in Europe, have older traditions on which to draw, and with which we can temper liberalism’s zealous certainties, America was liberal from the start and will remain so until the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated into a fundamentalist religion. It is only through this zealot’s devotion to liberalism that American policymakers sincerely believed they could bomb Afghan shepherds and bribe the Chinese politburo into becoming fellow acolytes.

Their certainty in liberalism’s manifest destiny to spread itself over every corner of the earth goes beyond reasonable analysis: it is a purely religious faith. Despite the failure of its devotees to achieve success wherever they have tried it, they will not stop, and cannot. It is a compulsion, a religious duty impossible for them to abandon, shared by both factions.

America’s crusading zeal is not just for export: through some magical process, all manner of political thought is in the United States transmuted into religion. Trump’s opponents on the liberal and radical left have mangled French postmodernist theory into a dour and millenarian Calvinism. On the populist right, the QAnon conspiracy theory is rapidly evolving into a widespread religious cult, a Manichaen heresy with Trump as its central vengeful deity.

Now the two opposing sects of American liberalism, conventionally characterised as political parties, are at war with each other, in a so far relatively bloodless battle for the nation’s soul. What the Reformation did tragically for Christianity in Europe, America’s political culture war is repeating farcically with liberalism.

If we observe the American war on Covid, we see it is America’s Chernobyl moment as much as China’s. The United States is by far the world’s worst-affected country in terms of total numbers, and its outbreak is still far from over. The symbolism of American states forming regional blocs to counteract the incompetence and total incapacity of its central government to save lives or arrest the virus’s progress lends weight to The Atlantic’s charge that the US now resembles a failed state.

The image of the Surgeon General of the richest and most powerful empire that has ever existed instructing Americans in a Twitter video how to improvise a mask out of a T-shirt — a T-shirt prominently advertising an opioid overdose antidote — is a potent symbol of deep and existential rot.

It is a country embroiled in political conflict over even the basic facts of science, from biology to medicine: because the American President promoted one potential Covid cure, half the country became devoted to its efficacy, and the other to its harmfulness. Had Trump condemned hydroxychloroquine, no doubt the same war would have taken place in reverse, with liberal commentators ostentatiously guzzling the drug on video to widespread approval.

Trump is a morbid symptom of this chaos, rather than its cause. The forthcoming election, which pits two gerontocrats of dubious mental acuity against each other, resembles the late Soviet era, before the regime collapsed under its own absurdities. America indeed represents a strange inversion of the Soviet collapse: the economy dwarfs that of any other nation, save China; its empire is still intact, and its military spans the globe more powerfully than any single challenger.

Yet at its centre the US echoes post-Soviet Russia in its epidemics of death by drug overdose, in its collapsing middle class, its worsening health outcomes and declining life expectancies, the capture of the state and economy by rapacious oligarchs, and in the occasional bouts of interethnic violence leading to demonstrations, riots and broader political dysfunction.

As the veteran American diplomat Richard Haass sadly observes: “Long before COVID-19 ravaged the earth, there had already been a precipitous decline in the appeal of the American model. Thanks to persistent political gridlock, gun violence, the mismanagement that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and more, what America represented grew increasingly unattractive to many. The federal government’s slow, incoherent, and all too often ineffective response to the pandemic will reinforce the already widespread view that the United States has lost its way.”

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What, then, is the appeal of this model to wavering allies in a new Cold War? The idea it can be considered a viable model of governance to follow is now patently absurd. As I sit typing this, troops are deployed on the streets of cities across the country, their Humvees still painted desert tan, as looters smash and burn and ransack shops, and protestors march against rubber bullets and tear gas; the tools of imperial policing are now brought to bear on the metropole.

It is surely impossible to view the US at this point as anything other than a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire for our own society to avoid its fate. In his Tablet essay, Lind glumly muses about a near-future United States withering into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities”.

While an America in decline may throw up a more competent caudillo than Trump in time, it is difficult to reasonably conclude that it possesses the societal solidarity to wage a decades-long, global struggle against a near-competitor. It is hard to imagine an American governing class scandalised at calling Covid a Chinese virus waging an existential conflict against China to a successful conclusion.

The country’s politics were torn apart, for four years, by a handful of Russian Facebook posts promoting Trump; how then will it cope with China’s far greater penetration of social media, of American commerce and industry, of universities and politics, of all the institutions of 21^st century American life? We do not know, yet, who will win this year’s election, nor whether the losing party, will, as in the previous election, attempt to overturn the result and further delegitimise the entire political process.

Perhaps the era of losing parties accepting election results has gone for good in America, now both sides view their opponents as a Schmittian enemy to be vanquished for eternity. America is too lost in its own internal conflict to contemplate a grander, global struggle with any confidence.

In any case, America’s foreign policy is disastrous in its own terms, even before Covid started coursing through its system. As the International Relations scholar Philip Cunliffe observes, America is that curious paradox, a revisionist hegemon, restlessly driven by ideology to overturn the very global order it charges itself with maintaining, producing what he terms a “cosmopolitan dystopia” that undermines America’s own position.

American attempts to overturn regimes which offend its liberal values have produced overwhelmingly negative results for the global system, spreading chaos and enhancing the reach and power of its geopolitical rivals. America’s record in these endless wars has not been one of success. Defeated, outflanked by Iran in Iraq, and clutching defeat from the jaws of victory in eastern Syria, America’s hegemonic military power and tactical skill has been relentlessly undermined by the total detachment from reality displayed by the Washington blob which determines the goals and course of the nation’s wars.

In a manner we can safely assume is not replicated in China, the architects of America’s endless policy failures, like the Iraq War, are not punished by the system, but awarded further sinecures and promotions by an establishment which rewards failure and hobbles success. Defeat is baked in from the outset: the rot is now so widespread it will likely become terminal.

American decline is starkly measurable in outcomes, even as its ballooning defence budgets sap the country’s economy. The United States can no longer keep its client states from each other’s throats, causing wars to break out even within the US alliance system: Qatar and Turkey’s attempts to establish Muslim Brotherhood governance projects across the Middle East and North Africa are directly challenged by the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s support for notionally secular strongmen, in a proxy conflict dragging in France and Russia and threatening Europe’s security.

Even a recent coup attempt in a bankrupt and unstable South American country failed despite Pompeo’s loudly-voiced support, which should have been America playing in easy mode. As in any horror movie, the threat’s coming from inside the building: all America’s rivals need do, like Russia in Syria, is exploit the contradictions and weaknesses of US policy, and turn the superpower’s weight and power against it at minimal cost and risk to themselves.

Unlike Iraq, or the Taliban emirate, however, there is fortunately little prospect of the United States engaging in open conflict with China. As Pentagon planners warn, it is unlikely that America will win even a limited naval engagement in China’s Pacific sphere of influence, let alone attempt a ground war against a billion-strong nuclear power.

Instead, we can expect a hybrid war that stops short of open confrontation, involving information warfare on social media, the hacking and sabotage of key infrastructure, the economic blackmail and extortion of allies through sanctions and tariffs and a dangerous jockeying for position as Covid accelerates the collapse of weak states across the ME and Africa, already teetering on the edge of failure.

The internet will surely emerge as a central battleground, and one which poses a far greater risk to America’s open, divided, and already-penetrated system than to China’s hermetically-sealed national internet: indeed, it is doubtful the worldwide web as we currently understand it will long survive a great power confrontation.

As hacked power grids and water treatment plants fail, and passenger planes mysteriously fall out of the sky, and top secret documents are released on social media, the rest of the world will find itself in the uncomfortable position of deciding which side presents the safest bet: and Covid has begun this process sooner than anyone expected.

Born in 1945, the American Empire was the global boomer, sitting astride the earth like it was a ride-on lawnmower, frittering away his children’s inheritance on cheap Chinese gewgaws and blaming everyone else for his poor decisions and for the decline of his powers. It is natural then, that it will be laid low by what is cruelly termed the Boomer plague, and we will do well to escape the hardship and bloodshed that attends the collapse of empires with as little harm to ourselves as possible.

While the protests in Tunisia received some international attention in 2010, they made global headlines in the early days of 2011. On January 2, the activist hacker collective known as Anonymous launched cyberattacks against the Tunisian government in solidarity with the protestors. By the end of the month, major protests were occurring in half a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arab Spring engulfed the region.

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Though protests have, of course, been a continuous part of politics around the world (2010, for example, saw a number of anti-austerity demonstrations across Europe), 2011 changed things in several important ways.

The Arab Spring challenged the stability of long-standing dictatorships that many scholars and pundits saw as unassailable — either because the dictators had apparently mastered the political techniques of authoritarianism, or because they simply enjoyed the luxury of living in a region that did not value democratic principles. When Francis Fukuyama asked in 1989 whether humanity had reached “the end of history” with the universal acceptance of liberal democracy, cultural relativists offered the so-called incompatibility between Islam and democratic values as a rebuttal to his argument. But even though dictatorship mostly endured in the region (although specific rulers like Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak fell), the tens of millions of people who came out into the streets showed that authoritarianism was contrary to the will of the people. In the words of the late Jamal Khashoggi:

“The debate about the relationship between Islam and democracy conclusively ended with the coming of the Arab Spring, when the people of the Arab world — especially the youth, and even the Islamists, including some Salafis, who were always critical of democracy — supported the protests for democratic and political change.”

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The Arab Spring’s demonstration of widespread support for democracy also highlighted the role of youth in the movement. The Middle East is experiencing a youth bulge, and these young people are technologically savvy and significantly more educated than their parents. But they are also frustrated by mass unemployment and the lack of the political freedoms they are able to observe in other parts of the world. Using both old-fashioned mobilisation techniques and social media, these young people drove the push for democracy and freedom in their countries. More recent protests in countries like Lebanon and Iraq show that this desire for change has not abated.

Even if the Arab Spring had been the only major protest movement of 2011, it would have made a strong case for that year being the most important of the decade. But the uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa at the beginning of the year inspired another movement.

In September, thousands of protestors marched, disrupted traffic and in many cases camped out in downtown Manhattan, demonstrating against growing inequality and the seeming lack of consequences paid by the individuals and institutions responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street, as the group was dubbed, was directly inspired by the millions who had come out in places like Tahrir Square. “We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends,” the group declared.

Just as the Tunisian protests of the beginning of the year soon sparked an international phenomenon, Occupy Wall Street quickly spawned imitators across America and throughout the western world. Like the Arab Spring, the globalised Occupy movement mobilised citizens from many countries around a common theme of resistance to oppression — this time economic rather than political. This latter internationalised movement reached its apotheosis on 15 October 2011, with protests in dozens of countries organised around the hashtagged slogan, “United for #GlobalChange.”

The movement was largely leaderless and amorphous, and as such it was no more successful than the Arab Spring at achieving specific policy goals. But it did manage to significantly shift the conversations about wealth and inequality, especially in the United States — just watch any of the Democratic debates or see the mainstreaming of Democratic Socialism, something that 10 years ago was considered a fringe leftist idea within US politics. Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to Labour leader owes much to the leftward shift triggered by the Occupy movement.

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Beyond their effects on mainstream politics, both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement shaped the nature of protests that have proliferated across the world in the last decade. The Arab Spring successfully merged 21^st century, youth-led social media activism with old-fashioned, ‘to the streets’ protests. Whereas ‘hashtag activism’ threatened to undermine more substantive forms of mass political action — why carry a sign and perhaps risk arrest when you could simply forward a tweet? — the Arab Spring used various media, social and otherwise, as tools to complement and magnify the crowds that gathered in the streets and public squares to demand change.

This unique marriage of youth-led organising, virtual propaganda and physical mobilisation has been replicated by individuals and movements such as Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, or the Parkland school shooting survivors and the American gun control movement.

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Meanwhile, Occupy’s lack of clear platform and its emphasis on protests over concrete policy goals represents the movement’s true legacy. Look at the very name: ‘Occupy Wall Street’, not ‘Change Wall Street’. The focus is not on the outcome, but on the protest itself. This model of expressive protest differentiated Occupy from earlier movements, and set the stage for many of the later movements to emerge in its wake.

Black Lives Matter, which has drawn considerable attention to police killings and violence against African Americans, has achieved some successes (the prosecution of a handful of individual police officers, and the mainstreaming of body camera technology as a way to keep officers accountable), but it has often been criticised for emphasising demonstration over specific policy goals. Likewise, the Women’s March, emulating Occupy Wall Street, is largely organised around a specific action (like Occupy, it highlights its tactics, rather than its goals, in its very name). The Right-wing also picked up these tactics, with formerly fringe groups emerging in events like the ill-fated Unite the Right rally.

In short, the forces unleashed in Tunisia and Manhattan in 2011 ensured that the subsequent decade was one in which tens of millions of people around the world found common cause to pour onto their respective streets. Some were demanding change, but many more were simply expressing their displeasure with the status quo.

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In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

As we enter 2020, the legacy of 2011 has morphed into seemingly countless movements around the world. But as in any uprising, counter-revolutions have also materialised. The backlash has taken the form of governments and powerful conservative forces responding to the outpouring of often young, often leftist or radical protestors. The outpouring of progressive anger has created a conservative backlash — not just with fringe Right-wing populist groups, but within mainstream politics as well. Although Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ascended to the top of their respective opposition parties, they remain far from number 10 or the Oval Office.

It can be argued that the Right, having watched Occupy fizzle out with few policy victories, has essentially adopted a strategy of accepting public displays of progressive anger as long as actual power remains in conservative hands. Impeachment, an expression of liberal anger in addition to a response to presidential misuse of power, seems destined to die a quick death in the US Senate. By contrast, Brexit, perhaps the ultimate expression of conservative resurgence, is steaming ahead.

Meanwhile, authoritarians around the world seem determined to prevent a new Arab Spring. Protestors in the nondemocratic world are seeing their internet-coordinated outrage met with increasingly tech-savvy forms of repression, ranging from government-engineered internet blackouts to increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies. After a decade, neither liberals nor conservatives, young radicals nor older conservatives, seem ready to back down. The battle lines drawn in 2011 have solidified and the years ahead are poised to be as contentious and tumultuous as the outgoing decade has been.

A few weeks ago, I bumped into Omran, a musician friend, who was serving salads, humous and pastries in a Lebanese cafe. We met three years ago through  our shared involvement in a project to reform a Syrian orchestra torn apart by the nightmare that has descended on that Middle Eastern nation. A singer from Damascus, he became a refugee in north London and harbours dreams of reviving his musical career. Before we parted, he told me insistently about a new film. “It is called For Sama,” he said. “You must see it.”

Now I have done so — and I understand Omran’s proselytising for this remarkable film. The horror of Syria has sparked some superb documentaries already, showing how protests seeking freedom from brutal dictatorship spiralled into bloodstained despair of civil war. Yet For Sama offers something fresh that goes far beyond being simply another chilling reminder of humankind’s barbarity and the savagery taking place in a collapsed nation. It is a highly personal film — a memoir from a young mother to her new baby — that is one of the most intimate and powerful insights into the realities of war that I have seen.

The film tells the tale in piecemeal chunks of Waad al-Kateab, a headstrong young teenager who had left her family to study at Aleppo University when the Arab Spring protests swept the region in 2011. She reminded me strongly of some students I met in Syria that year, eating in their flat and talking late into the night of their hopes and fears after the first wave of demonstrations spread across the country. Like this film-maker, they were filled with courage, determination and a beautiful idealism as they sought to remove the shackles of Bashar Assad’s regime and friends began to disappear into his torture chambers. I often wonder what happened to them.

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The Syrian conflict shouldn't be treated as a renewed Cold War

By Liam Halligan

Al-Kateab picked up a camera rather than a gun, turning it on her adopted city as peaceful protests were met with bullets, religious fanatics muscled in and Assad’s regime fought back aided by Russia. Much of this we have seen before: the graffiti being sprayed on walls, the dancing demonstrators who think they have won their freedom, the helicopters dropping barrel bombs, the bodies pulled from rubble, the astonishing drone footage of an historic city destroyed on epic scale. One scene of terrified families pushing their belongings along the street as they try to escape the carnage looks eerily familiar, like a throwback to all those Second World War films.

There is value in reminding people that this appalling conflict, which flickers in and out of headlines, continues to corrode Syria and its surrounding nations. Like many foreign reporters, the war has played a significant role in my own life for much of the past decade after spending time in the country, meeting so many refugees and hearing endless tales of trauma and tragedy. Yet what makes this documentary so compelling is how those familiar images of wrecked buildings and destroyed lives are woven around Al-Kateab’s personal story as she falls in love with a young doctor called Hamza and gives birth to her daughter in the besieged city.

So we see the couple getting married, the scan of their baby in the womb, the new mother singing nursery rhymes to the baby like millions more around the world. Yet these mundane images of family life, and others of cooking and eating with friends, are set amidst scenes of mutilated bodies, missing people, mothers screaming over the corpses of their children, rivers of blood swept from the floor of the makeshift hospital that becomes their home. Al-Kateab kept filming and presents a woman’s perspective as the siege tightened and the slaughter intensified, some footage appearing as citizen journalism reports for Channel 4 News.

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We glimpse what daily life is like when you are trapped inside terror, families caught in a conflict that so scars the world this century. Al-Kateab is not only a courageous journalist but also one capturing the cruellest aspect of this vile war: the targeting of hospitals by Assad and his Russian allies.

Hamza created his hospital with a few colleagues, several of whom are inevitably killed. Eventually it is the only one still functioning in east Aleppo, then it is bombed and they must find another site. This second clinic takes in 6,000 patients in just 20 days before the city falls. Once again this is also their home, where they share a room with another family of five, reduced to eating ant-infested rice as the regime noose tightens.

Sometimes the images of war are subtle, such as the look that passes across al-Kateab’s face as she works at her computer and a blast is heard nearby.There is a playful element as parents try to keep children entertained while crammed into small spaces behind sandbags. There is even a sliver of optimism in one gruelling scene showing frantic medical staff saving the life of an injured woman and the baby cut from her womb.

But mostly it is traumatic, such as when the child, with tears in his eyes, tells her that his friends are no longer there or — most painful of all — the two stunned boys covered in dust as they bring in their dead sibling, then kiss his head.

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This power comes from a personal narrative, at times almost like a shaky home video, showing desperate attempts of normality during life in hell. The baby drinks milk in a nest of blankets — then a helicopter flies overhead, bombs fall and sirens scream again as ambulances bring more casualties to the hospital.

Sama does not cry like a normal baby, notes her mother. An exhausted Hamza, working all hours to save lives amid chaos, finds solace in the family’s garden that provides a metaphor for the desecration of war. He takes delight in his efforts to grow flowers and trees, the couple enjoy a fall of snow – then their small oasis is destroyed in another of the remorseless attacks.

This remarkable film, spliced together in stuttering form and set to a sombre score, seeks to explain to Sama why her parents joined the revolt and stayed in the ruins. At the start, the mood feels light when she says she cared only for the uprising.

Later, the couple could have left the infant in Turkey with family members but chose to return in gripping scenes. At one point, as people file in near-darkness down to a basement during another assault, she asks her baby: “Will you ever forgive me?”

But this question of forgiveness goes far wider: to a world that accepts such horror and shows so little sympathy to its victims.

As Omran said, you must see this film.