The Strange Death of Politics
The last decade and a half saw a global explosion of political activity from below, which has now almost completely run its course.
Photo of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Protests
The last decade and a half saw a global explosion of political activity from below, which has now almost completely run its course. Its death can be witnessed in the increasing depoliticization of social media and the collapse of Twitter. It can be discerned in the weakening of rightwing populist and fascist movements across the world. It can be attested to in the strange disappearance of protests. It is apparent in Biden’s abandonment of democratization in favor of uncritical alliances with rightwing nationalists and fascists like Modi and Netanyahu, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of Israeli apartheid. But the evidence can probably also be found in your own life. In 2016, seemingly everybody was an activist, routinely posting on politics and joining in political debate; now, even professional political academics and journalists have largely withdrawn from the public sphere, so much so that we might be justified in asking whether the global public sphere itself has collapsed. How shall we account for this strange death of political participation and the even stranger failure of virtually anyone to take note of it?
The explosion of political activity might be said to have begun with the Great Recession and the election of Obama, or else Iran’s Green Revolution and the Arab Spring. Its source may have lain in the growth of blogs and the birth of social media, or perhaps it was inspired by a protest against ever increasing rates of inequality. Whatever the reasons, it made itself felt in a wave of protests striking every major region of the world, from Russia to Brazil, India to Syria, Egypt to Ukraine, Israel to the Congo.
Suddenly, protests were breaking out seemingly everywhere. And for a brief historical moment, one might have been justified in thinking that the end of dictatorship and the rule of financial elites was nigh. But in actuality, the era of democratic backsliding had just begun, and it was about to get a whole lot worse. Following several decades of growing global democratization, the number of democracies in the world began to decline in 2006, and the regression gradually picked up pace over the course of the next decade and a half. Almost every single one of us would find ourselves caught up in the attack and counter-attack on democratic institutions during this period.
Revolution was followed by counter-revolution, perhaps most sickeningly in the murderousness of Syria’s Assad regime. It gradually became evident that the end result of all that protesting in the early 2010s was the greater consolidation of authoritarian regimes and astronomically increasing inequality. Meanwhile, violence spread from Syria to Ukraine, with the Russian invasion of the Donbass in the winter of 2014. And as if by contagion, crimes against humanity began breaking out that spring in Libya, the Central African Republic, Kurdistan, and Gaza—soon to be followed by ever more in Burma, Yemen, the Philippines, and China.
The American unipolar moment was collapsing, and in the words of Ian Bremmer, it was “every nation for itself.” Meanwhile, a vastly more brutal idea of the world had taken root. The past few decades had been an era of growing global integration, which was sometimes lauded as the advance of humanity, and sometimes decried as a period of neoliberal homogenization, whose end result was environmental destruction. But with the advent of rising authoritarianism and crimes against humanity, the global imaginary through which we conceive of our relationship to the world began to darken. Everywhere, it seemed, people were withdrawing from the world into narrower identities. It was a vast retreat from globalism that is still with us today. Now, even the cosmopolitans can’t seem to refrain from attacking global institutions like peacekeeping, statebuilding, humanitarianism, and development aid.
Just as fascism sprang up in the 1920s in reaction to growing democratization and the empowerment of women, it once more exploded across every major region of the world in the mid-2010–and almost everybody took sides. It was a global struggle for the future of democracy, fought out on social media, and sometimes on the streets—and a fight for our common humanity—and the outcome was far from clear. I tracked these events and their deeper causes, first, in The Fascism This Time. But it was only with the revised version of The Holocausts We All Deny just last year that, to paraphrase Hegel, the Owl of Minerva spread its wings to me to reveal the era through which we had just passed.
The era in which Trump and Putin reined was an interregnum between world orders characterized by a global existential fight between the forces of democracy and autocracy. It was a period of bitter conflict in our families and communities, and terrifying anxieties in our psyches. There was always a danger that Trump might end American democracy and that the world itself might slip into a new dark age, made all the worse by climate change. Covid was not a random occurrence in this period, but rather the result of its breakdown of order and the corresponding staunched flow of information. Nor was the denialism with which it was met: that was part of the retreat into make believe that the global rise of fascism represented.
However, the era arguably ended when Biden rallied NATO allies in defense of Ukraine. For it said that the zone of peace associated with the alliance of democracies will not be broken without a fight, and the alliance of democracies is ready to band together to defend their freedom. It also said to the world that the citizens of the most advanced democracies cherish freedom and are willing to endure significant difficulties to preserve it abroad. Of course, that’s not the way most people saw the invasion of Ukraine. Most people think the real fight began when Russia launched its attack on Ukraine in 2022, that the violence of it represented the real existential battle for freedom, and that everything up to that point was a mere prelude. However, the real struggle for freedom was being fought from below in the years prior to it, and it was only when NATO rallied that the leaders of the world began fighting for the people, and Ukrainians took over the front lines of the global struggle for freedom. And when that happened, it signaled that the rest of us could finally take a break. Unfortunately, the mass burn out, and the accompanying depoliticization pointed out in this article, appears to have infected the alliance of democracies. As Biden coddles dictators like Muhammad Bin Salmin of Saudi Arabia, and chronic human rights abusers like Israel’s Netanyahu, what began as the rallying of democracies increasingly looks like just another power struggle. If Biden wants to build a stronger coalition of democracies, he should give everything to win over Brazil’s president, Lula De Silva. He should build stronger ties with Latin America, where the vast majority of countries are democracies. And he should crush Israeli apartheid, because the country is wedded to America and sullies the alliance of democracy through its association.
In the meantime, we would all do well to recognize the global collective traumas we have experienced over the course of the last decade. The crimes against humanity that took place during this period were fought out on social media. And each of us played a part in them as victims, perpetrators, observers, or saviors. The traumas exacerbated our anxieties and contributed to the intensity of our polarization. And they helped shape a brief moment between world orders, where the real collapse of global civilization seemed immanent.
The question that remains before us is whether we will complete the work of saving global democracy, or whether its saviors will become its gravediggers through their craven efforts to win over the world’s most fascist leaders. The choice is in our hands.
If you liked this article, please check out my book, The Holocausts We All Deny.
~ Theo Horesh
I wonder if there might be other factors to consider in what you diagnose as the depoliticization of social media. When I hear this, I think it must reflect a perception that the volume and intensity of political discussion on social media has reduced. I think you say in one of the Facebook comments that this observation seems to date from after the mid-terms.
I imagine one data point you might rely on is the level of reaction you get on your own Facebook posts. This could be a true read of overall salience of political posts, or a hint that overtly political posts are de-ranked in your friend's feeds because of either a top-down algorithmic adjustment (e.g., a strategy by Facebook to depoliticize) or "learning" by the algorithm that political posts aren't as popular *at the moment*. Or it could be an anomalous condition based on some other unrelated factors about you or your content. In any case, I'd love to hear more about the data you are using to assess the prevalence of political discussion on social media.
I certainly think Twitter is a little easier to understand. Musk reflects the same basic misunderstanding of social media that has led to the rise, and inevitable demise, of multiple pockets of "conservative" social media sites like Gab, Parlor, Truth Social, etc. What highly active MAGA folks and influencers want is social media warfare where they can antagonize and infuriate their opponents. What Musk and fake first amendment absolutist warriors mistakenly *think* they want is freedom to say whatever they want without blowback. What Musk has activated is defensive behavior by anyone that's not a right wing culture warrior to either retreat from Twitter, or wall themselves off from an onslaught of fascist shitposting. I almost never see these (fascist troll) posts unless I go looking for them or someone on my curated list retweets (or now, usually, screen captures) some egregious post. It's not hard to avoid the toxic soup, and so I think most people do; or else they just stop using Twitter.
I really love the thesis advanced here, and in The Holocausts We All Deny, that the global response against the rise of fascism arose from the bottom up. That the leaders joined the fight after "the people" made it clear that they were willing to fight for Democracy. But I wonder if we might overinterpret that phenomenon, especially when we're looking at such recent history. I wonder if there is a genuine "withdrawal" from the battle by "the people", if that's really reflected in the data about social media activism, and if there's a causal connection between that and what you fear might be a return to a mere "power struggle" among the great powers?
For one thing, we are, as you point out, in an interregnum. And we've trained people to GEAR UP TO 11 for each election. There's definitely fatigue (I think we share a view of a group we work with that exhibits that fatigue). I also think the last war WAS fought largely on social media, perhaps because our institutions did not know how to respond and we felt visceral fear that they would fail. It's only now - almost 3 years later - that we're seeing law enforcement and our jurisprudence system really meting out justice. It might just be the right time to "take a break" and see how that plays out (if, in fact, it does play out before the next election, which we must hope for).
You mentioned a flagging of enthusiasm on the part of Trump supporters (e.g., when he calls them to arms at his arraignments) -- to me, this might well reflect that the justice system has achieved one of its main goals: deterrence. Going forward, I would not be surprised to see a bunch of angry boomers thinking three times before being summoned to a mob that might very well land them with a life-changing engagement with the law. I'm hopeful this plays out at a higher level as well. For example, the recent indictments of 16 fake electors in Michigan might well signal to the lieutenants in Trump's army that the gig is up. Similarly, Fox is still digesting the outcome of the Dominion lawsuit (and faces several more of similar magnitude), and we may well have seen that accelerant of MAGA extremism tamped down a bit (e.g., Tucker firing). And Facebook faces a very angry bipartisan Congress that probably has it seriously thinking about how to tamp down on mis/disinformation (I'm not convinced they'll succeed; we should not underestimate that the bad guys have learned a LOT from prior iterations of this warfare), and that might be reflected in a temporary reduction in the material that most inflames a response from both sides.
All that to say that -- on "both sides" -- we're in an interesting interregnum and it feels to me too soon to really judge what the grassroots (and astroturf) level of energy is going to be going forward. Whatever it is, I'm pretty confident that social media -- at least Facebook -- will remain a primary target for misinformation and that we'll see that continue to ramp up. In fact, I go hunting for toxic MAGA related content nearly every day, and I find it readily. I think -- as the GOP is increasingly cornered by Trumpism -- the activity level will likely accelerate and become ever more vicious. I anticipate a great battle on social media. I'm hoping that we've created antibodies that will rise in proportion to that threat.