Of Fear and Strangers, page 29
However, when the 2008 crisis hit, lingering conflicts in the European Union burst into the open. Resentment came forward from nations who had shouldered much of the cost for bailing out the highly leveraged, nearly bankrupt nations of Spain and Greece. Local producers and workers in various nations worried that their governments would not protect them, given their EU commitments.
Despite these centrifugal pressures, debates continued over whether the EU should continue to grow. If so, who should rightly be considered? What were the ethnic, religious, or geographic limits of the EU? These long-debated questions became acute with the case of Turkey. Atatürk’s nation pitched itself to the EU by heralding its secular status. Geographically, it was almost entirely not part of the European continent, yet, if admitted, Turkey would become the second-largest and one of the poorest member states. Official negotiations began in 2004 but stalled, and they stayed that way. This was hardly a surprise, for Turkey had been briskly moving away from the EU’s requirements. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the country had become less democratic, less secular, and less tolerant. By 2008, the Turks were nowhere near acceptance into the union, but their futile efforts to gain admission were seized upon by Nigel Farage and others in the United Kingdom, who raised grave fears about an impending invasion of Turkish immigrants. This, I discovered, was the source of the worried gossip I had overheard in that London sweater shop.
After the crash of 2008, an array of anti–European Union, anti-globalization nationalists came up from the cellar. Some, like the Le Pens in France, had been toiling away since the early 1970s, earning the father, Jean-Marie, a conviction for inciting racist hatred thanks to his Holocaust denial. After years of demonizing Arabs and Jews, it seemed he and his daughter’s time had come. In the once mighty empire of Great Britain, nostalgia combined with resentment against their increasingly multicultural capital and the imperious demands coming from Brussels. In France and Great Britain, nativist slogans like “France for the French” and “England for the English” made a return from the dark corners of pre–World War II history. Anti-immigrant nationalists emerged into the mainstream. In the wake of Islamicist terrorism, politicians like Nicolas Sarkozy in France and David Cameron in Great Britain did not just denounce radical fanaticism, but declared the principle of multiculturalism to be dead. Alongside the retreat of these centrists, openly xenophobic populists—some harboring fond memories of midcentury fascism—stepped forward in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Anti-immigrant Brexit poster, 2016
Long-standing xenophobic fantasies of foreign invasion were given tangible form when, three years after the economic crash, desperate immigrants began to wash up on Europe’s shores. In 2011, the Syrian and North African migrant crisis erupted and built to a peak four years later. A shivering mass of Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghanis, as well as Albanians and Kosovans, desperately sought asylum. They came to Hungary, Austria, Sweden, Italy, France, and, most of all, Germany. These foreigners embodied helplessness, that same desperate state many Westerners had just experienced as their savings vaporized. If such a mutual experience of vulnerability brought forth sympathy from many, it also made others consider these refugees to be a threat and an intolerable burden. As large as this migration was, nativists in host countries dramatically overestimated their numbers and the amount of government aid they received.
Caught up in complex economic turmoil, no longer solely in control of their monetary policy or their borders, unclear if their local leaders had the power or will to protect their own interests, a growing number of Europeans found a tangible source for their discontent in an alien Other. Some nations that once embraced the idea of a unified Europe registered their distress by turning to authoritarian nationalists, who offered security and safety by focusing their rage on the half-drowned refugees on their shores. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán ratcheted up his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric and built a wall to repel the migrants. Soon he would move on from Muslims to grand, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories involving that advocate of open societies, George Soros. In Germany, Angela Merkel’s policies welcomed one million Syrian migrants and ushered forth a far-right reaction. The extremist Alternative for Germany was founded in 2013, and four years later, it was the third-largest party in that country. Most of its early followers lived far from the urban centers that hosted many immigrants, but they nonetheless railed against these intruders. In the first six months of 2019 alone, Germany recorded over 4000 violent attacks by xenophobes from the extreme right.
IN THE UNITED STATES, the swift end of the Cold War caused a stunned, disorienting euphoria. Kremlinologists were almost universally befuddled when this so-called mighty superpower proved to be feeble. What had they missed? Primed to assess the Soviet threat, ready to leap into action and prevent a nuclear assault, had they been blind to their enemy’s frailty? Years of Cold War stereotypes built up the threat of the “Evil Empire” and primed Americans to miss the big story.
President George H. W. Bush conceded that he and his advisers were utterly taken aback by the USSR’s collapse. When the dust cleared, Bush proclaimed the rise of a New World Order, a unipolar world in which American military power, individualism, free-market capitalism, and democracy reigned. “Neoliberalism”—with its rejection of the welfare state—now stood triumphant. Right-wing attacks on the safety net—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—were redoubled, launched from the high ground of ideological supremacy. “Trickle-down” economics, inaugurated nearly a decade earlier by Ronald Reagan, continued to magically justify cutting taxes on the wealthy. Opponents who questioned this were said, in an Orwellian turn of phrase, to be engaged in class warfare. Governments and centralized bureaucracies no longer were the solution; they needed to get out of the way of the private sector. An obscure State Department official named Francis Fukuyama wondered if humanity’s final acceptance of Western capitalism and liberal democracy represented the “end of history.”
History, it turned out, had a few tricks in store. The demise of the Reds was a bigger problem for the Red, White, and Blue than first imagined. When the celebrations ended, America had lost something, too. For nearly fifty years, this diverse, multicultural nation, which cherished its exceptionalism, had in part defined itself by being armed and ready to confront a clear and common enemy. Its running conflict with the totalitarian Soviets had been an ennobling battle that helped highlight America’s commitment to liberty and to being the leaders of the free world. The specter of the Soviet Union unified Americans who were urban and rural, white and minority, traditional and progressive, as well as rich and poor. Victory ended that.
When the militaristic Romans defeated the long-detested Carthaginians, that grand day, Sallust determined, was followed by decades of internal rivalry and civil war. After 1991, with the Soviets gone, American political life similarly became more riven. The traditional left, those onetime champions of labor, were upended by the victory of free-market economics. Liberals turned their focus more to the expansion of individual and civil rights. Many moderate Democrats followed Bill Clinton’s third way and stepped back from economic justice and statist interventions, all of which now reeked of failed Soviet models. Meanwhile, Republican Cold Warriors were even more disoriented. They had lost their raison d’être. What was their role in this New World Order? Many turned their sights toward reviving a more traditional, Christian America, which meant defeating their secular and cosmopolitan compatriots.
The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center provided new enemies and old answers. Islamic terrorists like al-Qaeda were small fry by American geopolitical standards, but they now had murdered more citizens on our homeland than any before them. As for negative stereotypes, these extremists were right out of Hollywood’s central casting: swarthy, fanatical, and willing to die just to kill Americans. In the years following 9/11, Muslims became, for the old Cold Warriors, a new American enemy, adding weight to the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s prediction—some argued his fervent wish—that with the Soviets gone, a clash between the Western and Islamic civilizations was inevitable. Xenophobia made a comeback, as rote stereotypes of Muslims and Arabs from Hollywood and Madison Avenue flooded the American imagination. After the terrorist strikes on New York, while President George W. Bush admirably stated that our ensuing wars were not against Islam, the cynical run-up to the war in Iraq demonstrated that Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Arabs in general could be lumped together to serve as a unifying Other.
However, it was neither Communism nor radical Islam that nearly felled the United States. If 1991 marked the final sigh of the Soviets, 2008 was the year that brought the Cold War victors to their knees. The dangers, it turned out, were internal. While the Soviets showcased how a state-controlled economy could shrivel, America demonstrated how unregulated capitalism could spin out of control. Starting in 1979, income disparities had grown so that, by 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that a measure of inequality, the Gini index, was the highest ever. Under Ronald Reagan, American policy makers not only cut taxes on the wealthiest but also began to loosen restrictions on banks. Depression-era policies were repealed, and despite a nearly immediate crisis, deregulation continued. Markets, it was said, would “self-regulate,” a fancier and more pretentious way of abiding by Adam Smith’s faith in “sympathy” and the market’s invisible hand. Obscure investment vehicles like derivatives were liberated from oversight; freedom was on the march. This ideology found its apogee in 2004, when the regulatory body, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, proposed that financial institutions be allowed to oversee themselves. The fox was in the henhouse, and not just in the United States; the leader of the free world had spread the same model of unrestrained markets around the globe.
Meanwhile, the emergence of the Internet brought forth global synergies, mergers, and growth. A newly interconnected world was busy being born, when suddenly there was a terrifying sound. In 2008, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers exploded. This set off a chain of reactions that led to the meltdown of the equities market and the tottering of too-big-to-fail banks. Like Watson’s quivering Little Albert, citizens looked on, unable to comprehend where all the pain was coming from. After inquiring, they heard about the Clinton-era repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, complex instruments like credit default swaps, and repackaged subprime mortgages. The crash of 2008 inaugurated the worst American economic contraction since 1929. The untrammeled forces of freedom had nearly self-immolated. No one was sure the global economy would survive. The president of the sole superpower was reported to have exclaimed, “This sucker could go down.”
When the United States had had their nemesis, no matter what trouble brewed at home, there was a likely cause in Boris Badenov and his Stalinist ilk. In a unipolar world, however, Americans had no one to blame for this sudden impoverishment, this helplessness and fear. The greatest military in world history was useless. Economic shock, humiliation, and resentment were now the lot of many in the richest nation on earth. Polarization increased between the wealthy and a slipping middle class, between a shrinking white majority and a rainbow of minorities, and between those positioned to benefit from expanding, global commerce and those left behind. Toleration was put to the test as twenty-four-hour cable news stations featured screaming partisans who furthered these divides. As hot-button issues were stoked, Americans spun apart as if in a centrifuge. Many seemed to be willing to vote against their own interests and close their eyes to blatant realities so as to remain secure within their own political tribe. Group ideologies solidified distrust of the other side and transformed suspicion into a rigid, unyielding hatred of the American Other. Whole states committed to the same conclusion before the facts: they were in the bag as red or blue. Swing states swayed, studies showed, due to the waxing and waning of white grievances against Blacks and immigrants.
The election of Barack Obama, who, unlike his opponent, demonstrated great poise in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown, was a watershed moment. It demonstrated the diminished force of racism for a majority of Americans, and it also fueled a furious backlash. The New York developer and television personality Donald Trump wildly decried the election of this foreigner, this illegitimate, “Nigerian-born” president. Tea Party populists, stirred up by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, denounced the browning of America and its flood of immigrants. Migrants, it was said, were threats, economically, criminally, and culturally. Statistics did not bear this out, but no matter. Trump’s nativist, anti-immigration stances and his devotion to building a wall on the southern border were portrayed as sticking up for besieged whites. His carnival show included baiting and belittling an array of minorities, stoking contempt and fear of Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and trafficking in contemptuous views of women, not to mention Hispanic and Black Americans. This would-be demagogue seemed to be searching for whatever negative stereotypes of the Other would stick, and in the fall of 2016, many of us discovered to our shock that a startling number had done just that.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED? By 2016, the belief in a New World Order with neoliberalism as its guiding ideology had come undone. A number of Western nations had retreated behind their borders. Some flirted with strongmen, who focused their followers’ rage and helplessness on a chosen outsider. It took some doing not to realize that these attacks on different kinds of foreigners and minorities were not isolated events, but I must admit, I was one of the blind men. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to reports out of Austria. The Poles? Hungarians? What did that have to do with me? In 2016, I realized, the answer was a great deal. The postwar order, off balance since the victory of the West, now had hurtled off the tracks. Newly empowered voices, oblivious to the post-Holocaust moral order, emerged. Xenophobia had come back from the dead.
The extent of this reawakening remains to be seen. It seems inevitable that there will be a reckoning, for despite this retreat behind hardened borders, many of the most desperate challenges we face remain global. Overpopulation, competition for limited natural resources, tragic numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, public health crises that do not respect national borders: all these are pressing twenty-first-century problems that can only be solved internationally. How much does it cost to purchase a nuclear weapon on the black market in the Baltics? Not enough. What is the next virus to hop from animals and terrorize mankind? Speculation is back on Wall Street; the result could be mass unemployment in far-off lands. Artificial intelligence, powerful new forms of propaganda, and cyber-warfare are potential threats that remain hard to fully fathom. Like nuclear weapons after Hiroshima, this novel force will remain deeply destabilizing until some international armistice can be negotiated. Automation and the loss of work may also make for millions of bereft souls who refuse to stay put, as their opportunities evaporate. And, most dauntingly of all, climate change bears down upon us. If unchecked, it will make crops fail and droughts impossible to endure. Water shortages, deforestation, and desertification will make for eco-exiles, perhaps in massive numbers. If patterns of weather, that very basic foundation for sedentary civilization, become chaotic and altered, how many more will be forced to turn back to migratory existences?
At the same time, each little corner of the world has been overrun. Like the waves of change brought forth by the telegraph, telephone, mass media, and moving pictures, an expanded, virtual reality now has swept through our lives. Digital technologies have muddied the very boundaries between the strangers and their hosts. What will it mean to be virtual in one’s identity and social affiliations, to be more a member of a virtual nation, than one’s own? Identity theft is not just a problem with credit cards; it is a metaphor. Our online “homes” may be invaded and occupied by unseen entities. We rightly worry that invisible beings steal our data, hack our histories, and feed us fake stories. They may control our beliefs, our behaviors, even our minds. Knowledge, the very basis of open, secular societies and the backbone of democracy, now comes to many of us through the most powerful propaganda tool ever constructed. Do gadgets once meant to connect you with a high-school flame ignite riots, get presidents elected, and foment mass murder? They already have. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
These disruptions are ones no nation-state alone can manage. The answers must be global as well as local. That requires tacking back and forth, not just in our politics and policies but, as the problem of xenophobia makes clear, in our identities. How can I be defined by my difference—my personal experiences, my language, my nation, my heritage, my needs, desires, and choices—and at the same time remain identified with all those foreigners in my nation, in my species? How can I advocate for my own parochial interests, while also not ending up like Albert Camus, necessarily choosing my motherland over justice? For the poet Walt Whitman, the answer was radical empathy; I contain, he famously wrote, multitudes. One of Whitman’s heirs, the postwar poet A. R. Ammons, put it in less heroic terms. We should not strive to be “homogenous pudding,” but rather:
united differences, surface difference expressing the common, underlying hope and fate of each person and people, a gathering into one place of multiple dissimilarity, each culture to its own cloth and style and tongue and gait, each culture, like the earth itself with commonlode center and variable surface …
Integrated minds, the poet wrote, made for an integrated nation, and the possibility of unity between nations. Conversely, unified nations help to foster the psychic integration of their citizens. As we have seen, xenophobia is debilitating and distorting on our inner lives, our local communities, and our broader political world. All of us possess the “commonlode center” as well as the diverse richness of surface variety. Universal human rights and radical egalitarianism reside in the former; toleration, cultural relativity, and local adaptations in the latter. Given our new global horizons, we cannot but strive to embody these truths and be, in this manner, two-minded.
