SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
");background-position:center;background-size:19px 19px;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-color:#222;padding:0;width:var(--form-elem-height);height:var(--form-elem-height);font-size:0;}:is(.js-newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter_bar.newsletter-wrapper) .widget__body:has(.response:not(:empty)) :is(.widget__headline, .widget__subheadline, #mc_embed_signup .mc-field-group, #mc_embed_signup input[type="submit"]){display:none;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) #mce-responses:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-row:1 / -1;grid-column:1 / -1;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget__body > .snark-line:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-column:1 / -1;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) :is(.newsletter-campaign:has(.response:not(:empty)), .newsletter-and-social:has(.response:not(:empty))){width:100%;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;justify-content:center;align-items:center;gap:8px 20px;margin:0 auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .text-element{display:flex;color:var(--shares-color);margin:0 !important;font-weight:400 !important;font-size:16px !important;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .whitebar_social{display:flex;gap:12px;width:auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col a{margin:0;background-color:#0000;padding:0;width:32px;height:32px;}.newsletter-wrapper .social_icon:after{display:none;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget article:before, .newsletter-wrapper .widget article:after{display:none;}#sFollow_Block_0_0_1_0_0_0_1{margin:0;}.donation_banner{position:relative;background:#000;}.donation_banner .posts-custom *, .donation_banner .posts-custom :after, .donation_banner .posts-custom :before{margin:0;}.donation_banner .posts-custom .widget{position:absolute;inset:0;}.donation_banner__wrapper{position:relative;z-index:2;pointer-events:none;}.donation_banner .donate_btn{position:relative;z-index:2;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_0{color:#fff;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_1{font-weight:normal;}.sticky-sidebar{margin:auto;}@media (min-width: 980px){.main:has(.sticky-sidebar){overflow:visible;}}@media (min-width: 980px){.row:has(.sticky-sidebar){display:flex;overflow:visible;}}@media (min-width: 980px){.sticky-sidebar{position:-webkit-sticky;position:sticky;top:100px;transition:top .3s ease-in-out, position .3s ease-in-out;}}.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper.sidebar{background:linear-gradient(91deg, #005dc7 28%, #1d63b2 65%, #0353ae 85%);}
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
To celebrate the spirit of Bandung is not simply to mark 70 years since the Asia-Africa Conference, but to affirm what being faithful to its principles and ideals means today.
The Bandung Conference in April 1955 has achieved the status of a mythical moment in the history of the Global South. There have been many accounts that have highlighted its downsides—among them, the underrepresentation of leaders from sub-Saharan Africa and the absence of anyone from Latin America, the way Cold War geopolitical rivalries found their way into the meeting, its legitimization of the nation state as the principal unit of interaction among the peoples of the postcolonial world to the detriment of other avenues of expressing and harnessing solidarity, and the disappointing aftermath exemplified by the India-China frontier war in the Himalayas in 1962.
Despite these undoubtedly important though arguably revisionist assertions, the “Bandung Moment” has achieved mythical status since, while its expression in the conference proceedings may have been less than perfect, the spirit of postcolonial unity among the rising peoples of the Global South pervaded the conference. Moreover, this spirit of Bandung has been a constant spur to many political actors to reproduce it in its imagined pristine form, leading to dissatisfaction with successive manifestations of Third World solidarity. To celebrate the spirit of Bandung is not simply to mark 70 years since the Asia-Africa Conference, but to affirm what being faithful to its principles and ideals means today.
It took determined resistance from the peoples of Vietnam, the Middle East, and other parts of the world to force the United States and its allies to learn the consequences of violating these principles, but it was at the cost of millions of lives in the Global South.
The Bandung document was primarily an anti-colonial document, and it is heartening to note that so many governments and peoples in the Global South have rallied behind the people of Palestine as they fight genocide and settler-colonialism in Gaza and the West Bank. The role of South Africa in lodging and pursuing the charge of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice, with the formal support of 31 other governments, is exemplary in this regard.
April 2025 , the 70th anniversary of Bandung, is also the 50th anniversary of the reunification of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The celebrations over the last few days in Ho Chi Minh City brought back images of that decisive defeat of the American empire—the iconic photos of a tank of the People’s Army smashing through the gate of the presidential palace in Saigon and the frenzied evacuation by helicopter of collaborators from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy. In retrospect, the defeat in Vietnam was the decisive blow dealt to American arms in the last century, one from which it never really recovered. True, the empire appeared to have a second wind in 2001 and 2003, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, but that illusion was shattered with the panicked, shameful exit of the United States and its Afghan subordinates from Kabul in 2021, the images of which evoked the memories of the debacle in Saigon decades earlier.
The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were the dramatic bookends of the military debacle of the empire, which had massive repercussions both globally and in the imperial heartland. Bandung underlined as key principles “Respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” and “Non-intervention or non-interference into the internal affairs of another country.” It took determined resistance from the peoples of Vietnam, the Middle East, and other parts of the world to force the United States and its allies to learn the consequences of violating these principles, but it was at the cost of millions of lives in the Global South. And it is by no means certain that the era of aggressive Western interventionism has come to an end.
The economic dimension of the struggle between the Global South and the Global North since Bandung might have been less dramatic, but it was no less consequential. And it was equally tortuous. Bandung was followed by the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, the formation of the Group of 77, and the establishment of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This upward arc in the struggle of the Global South for structural change in the global economy climaxed with the call for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974.
Then the counterrevolution began. Taking advantage of the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s, structural adjustment was foisted on the Global South via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, United Nations agencies like the U.N. Center for Transnational Corporations were either abolished or defanged, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) supplanted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and sidelined UNCTAD. The “jewel in the crown of multilateralism,” the WTO was meant to discipline the Global South not only with trade rules benefiting the Global North but also with anti-development regimes in intellectual property rights, investment, competition, and government procurement.
Will the BRICS or any other alternative multilateral system be able to avoid replicating the old order of power and hierarchy?
Instead of the promised “development decades” heralded by the rhetoric of the United Nations, Africa and Latin America experienced lost decades in the 1980s and 1990s, and in 1997, a massive regional financial crisis instigated by Western speculative capital and austerity programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund ended the “Asian Economic Miracle.”
Although most governments submitted to IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs, some, like Argentina, Venezuela, and Thailand resisted successfully, backed by their citizens. But the main area of economic war between North and South was the WTO. A partnership between southern governments and international civil society frustrated the adoption of the so-called Seattle Round during the Third Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Seattle. Then during the Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun in 2003, developing country governments staged a dramatic walk out from which the WTO never recovered; indeed, it lost its usefulness as the North’s principal agency of global trade and economic liberalization.
It was the sense of common interest and working together to oppose northern initiatives at the WTO that formed the basis for the formation of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which gradually emerged as an alternative pole to the U.S.-dominated multilateral system in the second decade of the 21st century.
The anchor of the BRICS was China. A country that had beaten imperialism over five decades of struggle in the first half of the 20th century, the People’s Republic confidently entered into a devil’s bargain with the West: In return for offering cheap labor, it sought massive foreign investment and, most important, advanced technology. Western capital, seeking super profits by exploiting Chinese labor, agreed to the deal, but it was China that got the better end of the bargain, embarking on a crash industrialization process that made it the number one economy in the globe as of today (depending of course on which metric one uses). The Chinese ascent had major implications for the Global South. China not only provided massive resources for development, becoming, as one analyst put it, the “world’s largest development bank.” By reducing dependence on the Western-dominated financial agencies and Western creditors, it also provided policy space for Southern actors to make strategic choices.
The obverse of China’s super industrialization was deindustrialization in the United States and Europe, and coupled with the global financial crisis of 2008, this led to a deep crisis of U.S. hegemony, sparking the recent momentous developments, like U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against friends and foes alike; his attacks on traditional U.S. allies that he accused of taking advantage of the United States; his abandonment of the WTO and, indeed, of the whole U.S.-dominated multilateral system; and his ongoing retrenchment and refocusing of U.S. economic and military assets in the Western Hemisphere.
All these developments have contributed to the current fluid moment, where the balance in the struggle between the North and South is tipping toward the latter.
But living up to and promoting the spirit of Bandung involves more than tipping the geopolitical and geoeconomic balance toward the Global South. The very first principle of the Bandung Declaration urged “Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou En Lai played stellar roles in Bandung, but can it be said that the governments they represented have remained faithful to this principle? India today is ruled by a Hindu nationalist government that considers Muslims to be second-class citizens, the military regime in Egypt has engaged in egregious violations of human rights, and Beijing is carrying out the forcible cultural assimilation of the Uygurs. It is difficult to see how such acts by these governments and others that initiated the historic conference, like Burma where a military junta is engaged in genocide, and Sri Lanka with decades of a violent civil war, can be seen as consistent with this principle.
Indeed, most states of the Global South are dominated by elites that, whether via authoritarian or liberal democratic regimes, keep their people down. The levels of poverty and inequality are shocking. The gini coefficient for Brazil is 0.53, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world. The rate for China, 0.47, also reflects tremendous inequality, despite remarkable successes in poverty reduction. In South Africa, the gini coefficient is an astounding 0.63, and 55.5% of the people live under the poverty line. In India, incomes have been polarizing over the past three decades with a significant increase in bilionaires and other “high net worth” Individuals.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet.
The vast masses of people throughout the Global South, including Indigenous communities, workers, peasants, fisherfolk, nomadic communities, and women are economically disenfranchised, and in liberal democracies, such as the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa, and Kenya, their participation in democracy is often limited to casting votes in periodic, often meaningless, electoral exercises. South-South investment and cooperation models such as the Belt and Road Initiative and free trade agreements frequently entail the capture of land, forests, water, and marine areas, and extraction of natural wealth for the purposes of national development. Local populations—many of whom are Indigenous—are dispossessed of their livelihoods, territories, and ancestral domains with scant legal recourse and access to justice, invoking the specter of homegrown colonialism and counterrevolutions.
Bandung, as noted earlier, institutionalized the nation state as the principal vehicle for cross-border relationships among countries. Had global movements like the Pan-African movement, the women’s movement, the labor movement, and the peasant movement been represented at the 1955 conference, the cross-border solidarities institutionalized in the post-Bandung world could perhaps have counteracted and mitigated, via lateral pressure, elite control of national governments. Those advocating for the self-determination of peoples, and for the redistribution of resources, opportunities, and wealth within national boundaries, would perhaps not have been demonized and persecuted as subversives and threats to national interests.
During this current moment of global transition, as the old Western-dominated multilateral system falls into irreversible decay, the new multipolar word will need new multilateral institutions. The challenge, especially for the big powers of the Global South, is not to create a replica of the old Western-dominated system, where the dominant powers merely used the U.N., WTO, and Bretton Woods institutions to indirectly impose their will and preferences on the vast majority of countries. Will the BRICS or any other alternative multilateral system be able to avoid replicating the old order of power and hierarchy? To be honest, the current political-economic regimes in the most powerful countries in the Global South do not inspire confidence.
At the time of the Bandung Conference, the political economy of the globe was more diverse. There was the communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. There was China, with its push to move from national democracy to socialism. There were the neutralist states like India that were seeking a third way between communism and capitalism. With decades of neoliberal transformation of both the Global North and the Global South, that diversity has vanished. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet. The dynamic centers of global capitalism may have moved, over the last 500 years, from the Mediterranean to Holland to Britain to the United States and now to the Asia Pacific, but capitalism continues to both penetrate the farthest reaches of the globe and deepen its entrenchment in areas it has subjugated. Capitalism continually melts all that is solid into thin air, to use an image from a famous manifesto, creating inequalities both within and among societies, and exacerbating, indeed threatening to render terminal, the relationship between the planet and the human community.
Can we fulfill the aspirations of Bandung without bringing forth a post-capitalist system of economic, social, and political relations? A system where people in all their diversity and strengths can participate and benefit equally, free from the violence of bigotry, racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism, and from the slavery to endless growth that is destroying the planet? That is the question, or rather that is the challenge, and the “unfinished business” of Bandung. The 10 principles that form the basis of the Bandung spirit are reflected in international human rights law but have been cynically manipulated to serve particular geopolitical, geoeconomic, racialized, and gendered interests. Being faithful to the spirit of Bandung in our era therefore, requires us to go beyond the limits of Bandung. The Bandung Spirit continues to signify ideals of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, peace, justice, self-determination, and solidarity—ideals that were shaped by the peoples of Asia and Africa at the forefront of struggles for liberation from colonialism and resistance to imperialism, who gave their lives for liberty. Despite the achievement of independence from colonial occupation—with significant exceptions like Palestine, West Papua, and Kanaky—struggles of rural and urban working classes for freedom from capitalist exploitation and extractivism, and from fascist alliances between capital and authoritarian states continue.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” declares a character in a famous novel. The world might seem to be on the cusp of a new era, with its promise of a new global order, but the Global South still has to awaken from the nightmare of the last 500 years. It is not coincidental that the birth of capitalism also saw the beginning of the colonial subjugation of the Global South. Only with the coming of a postcapitalist global order will the nightmare truly end.
My brief but deep immersion into Inughuit culture leaves me profoundly hopeful—believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland.
U.S. President Donald Trump, casting a covetous eye on Greenland, has my attention. I have a history in that place, so little known to Americans in general, having spent the entire year of 1964 at Thule Air Force Base, now Pitufik Space Station, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The road I’ve traveled since has me deeply concerned about Trump in every respect—believing that everything he represents and wants is contrary to the best interests of our country, the world, and mankind altogether, excepting perhaps oligarchs.
At Thule I was responsible for overseeing the maintenance of our air-to-air missiles and for supervising the loading of those missiles on board our F-102 fighter jets in the event of declared hostilities with our great “bugaboo,” the Soviet Union.
Many years later, after volunteering for and spending a year in Vietnam, I became a full-fledged “peacenik,” an adjunct professor of peace studies at the University of Maine, angry and in despair about this country’s militarism and particularly agitated about our vast empire of military bases on foreign lands. My experiences in Greenland and Vietnam were surely foundational to my conversion. I had become well-aware of the wide-spread, anti-base movement and sympathetic with the neighbors of these bases who, so often, experienced profound environmental degradation, noise pollution, and violence.
Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on “60 Minutes”: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!”
The heartless displacement of the Inughuit people of Thule, done without forenotice to enable the construction of a military base in 1951, 13 years prior to my assignment there, offers a good case in point. The place they called Uummannaq had been their home for centuries, and was the sacred burial grounds of their ancestors. In May of 1953, 300 men, women, and children, having been given four days to vacate their modest sod homes, set off by dogsled for a place called Qaanaaq, 150 kilometers across the icecap. No promised houses awaited them, and they were forced to live through the cold, wet summer in the tents they’d been given. They were denied the right to return to or hunt in their ancestral homelands.
I’d also learned that in 1968, a B52 had crashed on the icecap while attempting to make an emergency landing at Thule, spreading radioactive debris across the land. Four nuclear weapons were on board; one, never to be recovered.
This history and my developing curiosity about the real stories behind our military empire inspired my quest to visit Qaanaaq, a trip I was able to realize in 2008. That journey, and the people I met, provide the basis for my perspectives on Trump’s covetous ambitions.
Aqqaluk Lynge: Former member of the Greenland Parliament, former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (1995-2002), member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, honorary doctorate in humane letters—Dartmouth College (2012), and uthor ofThe Right to Return: 50 Years of Struggle by Relocated Inughuit in Greenland.
I had the good fortune to meet and to interview Mr Lynge, who at the time was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. He enabled my subsequent meetings with Qaanaaq people who had been among those evicted.
Uusaqqak Qujaukitsoq: Hunter, fisherman, and leader of the so-called Hingitaq 53, the group of nearly 500 Inughuits who launched legal proceedings against Denmark seeking their right to return. Uusaqqak had been a 12-year-old boy, living at Uummannaq, at the time of the eviction.
Tautianguaq Simigaq: Simigaq, a hunter, had been one of 13 Inuit who worked on the B52 crash site, 11 of whom had died by the time of my visit. He was among several hunters who reported seeing deformed walrus, seals, and foxes in the area of the crash in the years since.
It is no exaggeration that my visit with the people I met in Qaanaaq and Siorapaluk, the northernmost year-round inhabited settlement in Greenland, remain in my soul all these years later. Uusaqqak and his wife, Inger, invited me into their modest home and, though their English was limited, we spent many comfortable hours together, he sharing his life story to include the trauma of the dislocation, hunting and fishing, and education in Copenhagen. His travels had taken him far and wide. As a representative of the Inughuit people he had proudly once met Nelson Mandela. Their 30-year-old son, Magssanguaq, a virtual renaissance man, spoke English and Danish, and was a teacher, a musician, a poet, and an accomplished photographer. He had a keen sense of the injustices his people had suffered as victims of colonialism and would become my interpreter and guide.
Mags and I devoted much of our time in Qaanaaq to visiting and interviewing elders who had been victims of the displacement. Those sessions were, without exception, emotional in the telling and the listening.
My immersion into Inughuit culture, a deep one during my brief visit, but a lasting one of reflection, leaves me profoundly hopeful—believing that it will not come to pass that Trump’s rapacious nature shall determine the eventual fate of Greenland. I was made mindful of Syracuse University Scholar Philip Arnold’s The Urgency of Indigenous Values, in which he argues that the very future of the world is dependent upon the ascendency of “green values” of Indigenous populations everywhere, as opposed to the “raider” values of our dominant culture. The history of the Inughuits who had lived on their sacred lands at Uummannaq for centuries is known by all Greenlanders, 89% of whom are of Inuit descent. I would assert that Trump represents, even personifies, “raider” values, and is seen that way by a large majority of all people of Greenland.
I have recently read that Trump is bringing Columbus Day “back from the ashes.” Hmmm! How might that play with Indigenous people?
Speaking of Trump and his eye on Greenland, the senior statesman Aqqaluk Lynge had this to say on “60 Minutes”: “He mentioned Greenland like it was a toy or something. It was ugly!”
Watch it. They’re not words of casual sentiment.
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
George Packer recently wrote an Atlantic piece that cleverly situated the Trump regime within a familiar Orwellian framework.
According to Packer, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), and other slavish Trump sycophants have become comically ridiculous (Packer references Henri Bergson's theory of comedy) in direct proportion to their ability to absurdly and mechanically mimic President Donald Trump's perspective with the same rhetorical mannerisms that they had employed mere months ago to argue the exact opposite point of view. "Without missing a beat" they once spoke skillfully on behalf of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now (in robotic fashion) they laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. They are stooges of the moment, laughable figures right out of the pages of 1984.
As Packer sees it, the old order of American NATO alliances had "made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history." In his view the U.S. descent into realms of Orwellian mendacity originates with the antics of Trump and his lapdogs. Packer does not trace the U.S. embrace of dystopian culture to, say, renaming the U.S. military juggernaut the Department of Defense—an example of Orwellian deception far more confusing than playing a game of musical chairs with global alliances.
The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
Packer's calculus proposes that the danger of Trump stems from his power to humiliate and control his underlings in such a fashion that only he retains the ability to speak his mind, while all of the lesser accoutrements of the MAGA-sphere are reduced to being mechanized puppets.
I worry that many mainstream liberal pundits have made fascism into a Trump-centric formula—liberals like Packer betray nostalgia for past glories of American democracy and the world order that the U.S. largely controlled after WW II, and dominated almost completely after the Soviet fall. Like most instances of political nostalgia, this view depends on a myopic distortion. The uniquely prosperous and stable eight decades that Packer lauds were eight decades of war, regime change, colonial extraction, and—notably—eight decades of gathering extinction, environmental degradation, and skewed wealth.
We can either see Trump as a fracture in time, a great misfortune, a lightning bolt from hell intent on destroying a formerly beneficent arrangement of policies and alliances, or we can alternatively see Trump as a representation of American values—a mirror of the culture we created. The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
By the same token we might raise a skeptical eye at Packer's revisionist assessment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his passive discomfort as an extra in the theatrical meeting with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy:
He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.
I have far more curiosity about the inner contortions that George Packer employed to rehabilitate Marco Rubio—a stick figure neocon with predictable views on corporately inflicted climate overheating (he doesn't believe in it), gun control (he doesn't believe in it), and abortion (he doesn't believe in it). The one thing that Rubio believes in with undeterred passion is war, and this, in Packer's view, makes him a "passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism." Apparently, Rubio's enthusiasm for giving the authoritarian genocidaire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a blank check for all the bombs of his dreams has no effect on Packer's assessment.
Rubio's constricted body language during the Trump-Zelenskyy showdown seemingly provides Packer with the pretext to assume that Republican capitulation to Trump conceals, in at least some instances, an internal moral crisis. It may be that Rubio had some sort of confused hiccup, a moment of puzzlement, as the story line shifted on a dime, or it may be that Rubio recoiled at his passive role, his mandate to be a mute walk-on in a drama that might have been more persuasive had he been excluded.
Packer gives himself license to fantasize about the allegedly tortured inner life of sycophants, and that troubles me. If we overly humanize Trump's henchmen and speculatively envision them as ambivalent victims of Trump's alleged mystical powers, we miss the seriousness of our predicament. U.S. politicians have been morally castrated as a matter of structural design, for, at least the eight decades of my lifetime. Trump can't be blamed for the vacuous surrender to corporate schemes that U.S. politicians dependably perform. Give Trump credit for exploiting the soulless dregs that he has surrounded himself with, but he did not drain the humanity from Marco Rubio. The moral desert that comprises the center of the former Florida senator resulted from a drought that long preceded Trump.
I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution.
Packer concludes his piece by asserting that the public view of the Russian-Ukraine conflict has not followed the narrative plot that Republican politicians newly embrace. The public still reviles Putin, and two-thirds of Americans (according to polls that Packer cites) want to continue to arm Ukraine. In Packer's view, America's public approval for arming Ukraine "might be America's last best hope." This misses the larger issue—how did the U.S. become a rapidly consolidating fascist country with politicians (centrist Democrats, neocons, libertarians, MAGA loyalists), all playing their preassigned bit parts?
The true masters of the system, the military industrialists and the corporate profiteers, lose nothing if the U.S. shifts alliances. The public support for Ukraine is little more than a lingering reflection of recent media perspectives. The public is always at the mercy of mass media and corporate control of information. In a country that has spent more money on military spending than the nine leading global competitors combined, the U.S. public still fails to react with alarm. Militaristic propaganda is at the heart of public control, and there are not even vestiges of antiwar passion detectable within the congressional body.
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
A proposed withdrawal into the recent past of former President Joe Biden, or even former President Barack Obama (if it were even possible to do so—it isn't), condemns the public to accept a retreat into familiar safety—a set of governmental policies that the late David Graeber attributed to "dead zones of the imagination."
Graeber noted that:
…revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and reimagine everything around them.
A true resistance to fascism would involve something more powerful than fatuous dreams about an idealized past. After all, superficial fantasies about the virtues of the past are Trump's shtick. I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution. The option of stepping meekly into the immediate past, as Packer proposes, will excite almost no one. This is a time—taking inspiration from David Graeber—for recreation and reimagining.