If we were to re-define the word reactionary today, it would have nothing to do with one’s agreement with ‘progress’, but would be an accusation levelled at all cries for a returns to the pre-08’ years. Most politics are somewhat defined by this, today. The technocratic, neo-liberal establishment wishes to return to the stable years of global capitalism (post war period - although the years of stability vary depending on who you ask).
Technocrats simultaneously wish to retain a uni-polar order with the American deep state as the guarantor of the growth of post-war capitalism. When this historical container begins to crack, our version of ‘reactionary’ usually demands a return to 2006 or so. When anything goes(even temporarily) their way, such as the very beginning of the Ukraine war or Biden’s 2020 electoral victory, we encounter a triumphalism by way of a short-journeying time machine. David Cameron returns. The eastern Europeans still want to be liberals (ignore the Nazi memorabilia). The housing market will even out(still hasn’t yet). Mental illness rates aren’t that bad(they are). It’s 2006 again! (It’s not)
In reality, the mass political anger encountered after the 08' crash was basically correct in instinct. Regardless of particular measures of austerity, it was a time when a substantial number of people understood that the social contract had been betrayed. Certain austerity measures were pushed through. Others were abandoned for political reasons. Yet, these particularities miss the point. Since this time, the same power structures have pushed through policy after policy which has been nothing more than a further expression of this devastated social contract. Immigration, pandemic measures, tax cuts for corporations and tax raises for the middle and working class, opportunistic cancellations, infrastructure and resource privatization, institutional corruption, and of course the unbearable levels of gaslighting stemming of establishment media outlets.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly the cause of this collapse. There are valid arguments that liberalism will eventually collapse, the more it distances itself from its historical axioms (Christianity or industrial society, for example). Some believe liberalism simply takes ideological convictions towards excessive rationality, economism or tolerance too far for a society to legitimately continue. Some would argue globalization has structurally changed the society in ways which the liberal democratic order cannot keep up with. Some might point the finger at declines in social capital, some of increasing economic inequality. It’s likely that all of these answers are somewhat true, and the cause is multi-factorial. However we frame it, illegitimacy is the inevitable consequence.
Realizing this illegitimacy should start with the 08’ financial crash: it was not simply a financial crisis which lowered generational living standards and imposed tighter finical conditions on the majority of Western citizens. As a properly historical event, it marked a threshold which revealed the end of the legitimacy of the post-war order; potentially even the end of liberal democracies as we know them. This was exactly what Agamben correctly remarked at the beginning of the Covid lockdowns.
It’s easy to dismiss all the political anger of the time: either from a conservative position (how can these people criticize capitalism while drinking a coffee from Starbucks?!) or from a therapeutic position (clean your room before you think about politics) or from a romanticization of so called ordinary people—we could call this the industrialists or workism perspective (real working class people work and stick to their private lives with no real interest in politics). In truth, the 08’ crash disrupted all of these anti-political assumptions. Initially because such blatant structural flaws could not be reduced to moralizations of personal consumption or motivation—and later because the system has entirely failed to re-stabilize(even on liberal capitalism’s preferred ideological and systemic grounds), leading to crisis after crisis.
All of these reactions (conservative, therapeutic and workerism) are all the result of the expression of the same failure to be ready for the sudden historical collapse of the legitimacy of the liberal-democratic social order; more or less the same could be stated concerning the cause of the state of perpetual crisis.
In fact, the left could be evaluated on these grounds, more so than anyone else. The particularly infantile character that the left have exemplified over the past ten years points to an incapacity to address this collapse. On a psycho-political level this makes sense. All social contracts are not more than a somewhat bureaucratic manner of describing the fundamental moral and legal core of a society’s social fabric. Social contracts are not simply expressions of the explicit commercial contracts that we encounter on a regular basis when we sign up to a new streaming platform or take out a loan from the bank. Social contracts include the implicit, often unwritten duties and obligations which maintain this very societal fabric.
Of course, every social contract has its own particular logic and character. Yet, regardless of ideological and historical differences, each variation is bound to eternal standards. One can make different dishes with different ingredients, but every meal can be cooked in a good or a bad way. Our contemporary social order hides behind the allure and propaganda of progress in order to avert being evaluated on its cooking, objectively; If you don’t like it, you have bad taste, so we are told.
The left’s naïve obsession with social progress has been infinitely useful in this regard. If one contests the failure of duties and obligations that structure these civilizational bonds, they can easily be accused of harbouring some form of fascistic or (ironically) reactionary tendencies. Politically speaking, they can be accused of bad taste.
The left have not been able to register the betrayal of this fundamental societal relation for a number of reasons. It has expelled from its organizations, anyone who might be composed enough to realize it. Also, an excessively white collar left is far easier to create converging interests with, from the establishments point of view, than a majority working class one. Psychologically, we have perhaps underestimated how difficult the full realization of these betrayed obligations are—or greatly overestimated the seemingly ‘well educated’ who make up the left; it’s likely a mixture of the two. A certain level of courage and maturity is necessary to endure the unsettling realization that ultimately nothing but cold self-interest and fear holds together our contemporary social order. The post-industrial left has simply not been made up of those capable of bearing this historical burden.
Not being able to register this betrayal in its long term significance, the left has hidden behind an infantile shield of quite sycophantic relations to the global capitalism and technocratic state authorities. (This was particularly clear during the Covid lockdowns where a full blown infantile worshiping of experts ensued). Despite the fact that so many of these ‘experts’ were from the very power structures of society the left was once critical of, we should not shy away from realizing simply how hopeless the left has become.
Oddly enough, it used to be the case that the left was often the more mature voice in the room. When it came to its scepticism of certain forces of globalization— and the authorities that served it, for much of modernity, the left has held itself to a higher standard than its counterparts.. The situation has changed so dramatically over the past fifteen years—and perhaps it was already the case, and it took more than a decade of realizing these realities—but we currently live in time where any realistic scepticism of the power structures of globalization has been expelled.
On the other hand, the right finds itself in a tricky spot because it has always presented itself as the voice of caution when it comes to social experimentation and progressivism. Yet, it has typically had its own naïve and infantile view of institutional and corporate authority. Populism on the right has had to rapidly re-evaluate its view of institutional authorities towards a novel (for them) perspective that looks more like how the left once was in many regards: suspicious, antagonistic, and critical. The right’s leaders, however, having grown used to a political base that was particularly naïve in their view of institutional authorities, have entirely failed to adapt to a new political base; a base that, in fact, looks more like what the left used to appeal to (at least in its relation to power structures, if not cultural and social values). The right has been caught off guard as much as everyone else—and it’s not clear whether they will be able to adapt, in the long term, in order to properly address this destroyed social contract in question.
The entire political landscape now stands in front of a threshold. It is characterized by doing all it can to avoid crossing it. One shouldn’t reduce this to ‘conditions’. There is also a psychological, existential and historical component to this stagnant period. The ‘interregnum’, has been used by sociologist Wolfgang Streek (borrowed from Gramsci) to describe a period in between two eras whereby there is seemingly no political and historical presence which could initiate a new era; a definition which he applies accurately to the post-08 crash era.
This middle period is one where we become masters at avoiding a realization and do everything we can to avert addressing it—not to mention walking through whatever fire exists on the other side of the shield that we have built for ourselves. This is clearly a time that takes high rent costs for long term accommodations. The total breakdown of social capital(another unfortunately economistic term) indicates that it is increasingly the case that we will fail to find a minimally comfortable habitation in the interregnum.
The more social capital declines, caused by staying too long in this period—perhaps the harder it might be to push forward and out of it. To use a military strategic analogy. If you plan a siege but are unsure on the outcome of the attack, staying put, gradually reducing foods stocks, morale, enduring worsening weather conditions, we then run the risk of conflating caution with an indefinitely intelligent disposition. Periods of hesitation take their toll, even if they are somewhat necessary for re-evaluation of circumstances. There is a limit to everything—even to caution.
Secondly, the growing rage, which is inevitably caused by living in the interregnum can be devasting. The 2019 film Joker is a wonderful expression of purgatorial reality. The film depicts a world with no reciprocity, trust, legitimacy or coherency: A slow, painful, nonsensical and illegitimate social reality that will eventually lead to an equally incoherent expression of anger.
The moralists and the rationalists among us should be brave enough to realize that anger, coherent or incoherent, is inevitable. It is somewhat of a natural law, we could even say. When the social contract breaks down, there is no going back to the easily self-satisfied consumer society that defines the end of history. The choices are as such: to go through it—or stay in the interregnum long enough to totally lose any sense of ourselves. The sooner our ‘choices’ are realized—or rather lackthereof— the sooner some sort of political movement can structure itself on accepting its fate—and insisting that movement and risk are inseparable..
The situation is actually more hopeful than is often made out by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum. The left has exhausted its historical purpose and will likely not wish to admit this at any time in the near future. The right is having to wean itself from its traditionally naïve relationship to big institutions and to capitalism. Both are unprepared.
However, it is somewhat of an inevitability that we would go through a failed first attempt at jumping back into the cold, deep water that is politics. The entire post-war period has altered the landscape of politics in ways which has put us all in a terrible position; one where mass political energies must be adequately orchestrated and directed towards creating a pathway—not simply towards this or that particular end—but out of the interregnum, proper.
A trial period of chaos and failure was somewhat inevitable. Yet, could we not say that we are passed the most catastrophic period of this failed trial? Could we not argue that we are over the worst convulsions of this re-climatizing to the bitter atmosphere of history? The Russians, agree with them or not, have at least accepted their fate. Those in the West with a lot to lose in the coming two decades should learn to accept theirs.
All the realisms which many astute analysts have diagnosed our current geist with, (capitalist, progressive, liberal, market-fundamentalist) —and all the hauntological stupors and depressive spiritual collapses, are all somewhat part of the process of political re-climatization. They shouldn’t simply be seen as indicators of permanent stasis—but an inescapable moments of unreadiness which must be pushed past in order to truly create a trajectory out of the interregnum.