Wake up, America: 2016 is over, long over by now, and you are still not over it, still hungover from that terrible last night when you went home with that sleazy old guy who just told you everything you needed to hear to just feel okay, just for a little while. Well, guess what, America: the world is a frightening place. Talk is in the air of a new Cold War; anxious pundits speak of military exercises on foreign borders, the scramblings of fighter jets, the resurrection of the old techniques of disinformation and character assassination. The pundits nod their heads ominously. Talk is in the air of a new 1940. Ethnic nationalism seems to be on the rise across Eastern Europe, with scary old men like Viktor Orban in Hungary ostentatiously pounding their Christian chests and longing, implicitly or explicitly, for the good old days when people who don’t look like them didn’t dare set foot in their countries. Even Germany could fall, and with it the EU—good old Angela Merkel, one of the loudest proponents of a Europe in which countries cooperate and refugees are people, even if they are colored and Muslim, is at her lowest point in the polls in five years, seemingly because of these liberal positions. What lessons do you think young politicians in Germany take from this?
But we are not living in the 40s, and unless you buck up and listen, you will not come out of this stronger, America, unlike that bout of drinking and depression you had in your college years, oh, almost 90 years ago. The world is different now, and I’m afraid to say that a lot of the big ideas that make the history of those times fun to study (if you are fortunate enough to have had a history teacher who makes them fun to study) are simply absent from the world stage today, with an uncomfortable void left in their place. Squint hard and Putin’s Russia looks like the USSR, but read past any of those doomsday headlines, read other articles, and you will eventually find out that the comparison is, well, flawed. Putin’s Russia, unlike the USSR, has never had any higher ideal capable of motivating the masses, but rather subsists on a mix of fear and deception—that as bad as Russian corruption and poverty are, life on the outside is worse. The same goes for the other headliner, China: Maoism is fun, Maoism is great, until you kill millions of people. You can still lie about it though, and some people will still believe it. But what happens when your economy sucks? You loosen up, or at least get off your moral high ground. And so China today, powerful as it is, is simply the work of powerful-seeming men in suits doing whatever they can to keep the masses happy, and the Party remains in power partly through fear and partly through the bare minimum—the faintest shred of a decent life—that it has been able to provide through factory work and effective economic policies to many millions of people who had previously lived in poverty.
And so, America, we are fighting a machine. The nightmares that leave us panting, the enemies we find ourselves up against, have not twisted, however crudely, Darwin’s elevated creed. They have not aspired to rob from the rich and give to the poor, in doing so imagining themselves, like any human, the underdog, and deserving of a bountiful part of what’s robbed, but are, more frighteningly, mindless robots, ruthlessly executing their programs of expansion and development until they should collapse under their own weight. The trouble is, for the time being, they don’t seem likely to collapse on their own—whether such a system as China’s can survive indefinitely without providing its citizens meaningful rights is a question that only time can answer, but China nevertheless stands today proud and ascendant. And so, America, what will we do to conquer the machines, those Russias, those false nationalisms, who have enslaved, and desire nothing more than to enslave, a greater part of humankind? We will hit them where they are weak, of course. We will confuse their algorithmic brains that only understand economic development and production figures with such messy ideas as liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Well, maybe. That seems like a nice happy ending.
But the reality that is this would only work if it were not an era in which we are weak as well. Look hard at this election, look hard at this man we decided to sleep with, he who supports torture and admires Putin, and it’s hard to argue that we care that much about those things, those grander things. America is old. America has a lot of skeletons in its closet. But for us, for this most peculiar of nations, ideals are a do-or-die sort of thing—there simply is not a lot that otherwise holds us together. So it’s time that we stop being cynical; it’s time to stop pretending that we have seen it all before. Liberalism is in the midst of an identity crisis and there is no easy way out. It’s going to require a lot of thinking. It’s going to require people who care, who care about politics, who care about the world. So be idealistic, America, and reinvent yourself after this identity crisis of years, with some strong ideas, with some new ideas. For this is the only way we will avoid the sickening process of becoming not a nation, but a cyborg.