A protester holds a sign saying "Trump wins" at a rally in support of US President Donald Trump at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, Oregon, US January 6, 2021.
The political temperatures are rising everywhere around the globe. It feels like – although it’s not – the late 1980s when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, and the winds of change swept across globe. In their wake, the forces of revolution left behind the ruins of military dictatorships, Soviet-style centralised regimes, authoritarian governments, and illiberal democracies.
The West thought that internationalism liberalism had triumphed over communism. For a decade that seemed to be true, but popular discontent with the emergent democracies cut short that exuberance. Runaway free markets and fake democracy alienated folks everywhere. Today, it feels as if history is repeating itself again. We may be on the cusp of another seismic change. Fascism and disorder are on the doorstep.
To me, it feels as if the world is a slow-moving train wreck. We know the inevitable is happening, but we are powerless to stop it. A powder-keg awaits. We are bracing for impact, frozen in our seats, or blinded by our hubris.
Armageddon is egging us on, begging us to tempt fate, and we are obliging. What will impact look like – a nuclear winter, or a new beginning? I am not being alarmist. Just look round the globe. America has just elected an unhinged madman. Russia has one who plays video games with the nuclear button. China is bent on world domination at whatever cost.
Global leadership
Israel has decided to take this vacuum of global leadership to wipe out Palestinians. What the heck is going on, and why are we here? First, the world order established by the United States after WWII has collapsed. Democracy, which was presented as the cure for political despotism and economic privation, has failed to bring nirvana to the majority of the world’s people.
At the centre of capitalism in Washington DC, the American people have said nyet to democracy, as we know it. They’ve elected a dude who forged a failed coup in 2021. He ran on a platform of racism and American isolationism. He intends to impose on America personal rule. America has turned its back on human rights and the rule of law. It has trashed liberalism in history’s garbage heap.
Secondly, governments everywhere have embraced hypocrisy as a guiding philosophy. They say one thing, and do another. They don’t mean what they, or say what they mean. Again, just look at the Biden Administration and its policies towards Ukraine and Israel. In Ukraine, President Biden correctly opposes Russian invasion and rightly arms Ukraine against the Kremlin’s illegal war and mass atrocity.
But in Israel, the US supplies Mr Netanyahu with the most lethal weapons to kill innocent Palestinian women and children under the guise of hunting down Hamas, which has long been degraded and decimated. Mr Netanyahu has returned Gaza back to the Stone Age. Yet we helplessly watch the massive losses of life in Gaza and Ukraine.
Thirdly, the lives of Black and Brown people continue to be worthless. Look at the carnage in Sudan. There, the world’s forgotten war has virtually destroyed a whole country and no one cares. Elsewhere in Africa, people continue to live a life of sub-humans.
Exploding populations
The economies have failed to grow to meet the exploding populations. Even when the economies grow, the elite suck up all the surplus, leaving nothing for reinvestment. Economies in Africa are gagging under the weight of external debt from bilateral, commercial, and multilateral lending institutions. The centre can no longer hold, and the falcon can’t hear the falconer. Things are falling apart right before our own eyes. The elites are on a Titanic, and don’t know it.
Fourthly, the world is in a moral crisis. There’s a vacuum of morality everywhere. In these headwinds, climate change threatens to destroy the planet. There are no moral voices left. Even the Pope is no longer believable. The Church and the Mosque have lost the people. Femicide and other forms of hate have become commonplace.
We are living in a fact-free world. People with access to social media have information – much of it fake, or half-baked – but they think they have knowledge. The culture of reading and learning is lost unless you call reading Facebook and X a form of education. We are dancing perilously on a cliff like Caligula’s Rome. The most dimwitted people – our inferiors – now rule the world.
Lastly, the Age of Discontent is of our own making. Led by our elites, we have allowed them to take us to the slaughterhouse by playing to our most common, base, meanest proclivities – tribalism, racism, naked materialism, fake religion, and a disdain for education. In return, the people have lost faith, respect, and fear in the state.
Law and order are out the window. It seems like Nelson Mandela, a figure of moral authority, lived centuries ago. Where are our Mandelas? Who will stand up and be counted as a moral compass? Who will be our Martin Luther King Jr? Are we doomed?
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. @makaumutua.
