Around the world there are approximately seven or eight coups d’états each year of which only about half last for more than a week. That’s not counting situations in which a party comes to power democratically, diverges in key ways from its manifesto and interferes with subsequent elections, but those cases are not notably more successful over the longer term.
Given that trying and failing to seize power tends to leave one in a vulnerable situation, it’s a big risk to take. Sheer military power is not enough to guarantee being able to hold on. For long lasting success, a new regime needs to successfully change the perceived norms of the society it aims to control.
This is the effort that’s underway in the US now, and it’s having a ripple effect around the rest of the world, where a wider right-wing movement aligned with the interests of the billionaire class is seeking to mould a more compliant society. To resist it effectively, we need to reassert values which might sound obvious, but which are under serious, insidious threat.
Truth matters
The first and most important of these values, because everything else depends on it, is truth. The very idea that truth matters is under threat from cultural movements which suggest that the convenience of AI and the comfort of infotainment is more important. We have reached a point where we can no longer trust search engines; where low cost online bookshops are full of unedited material, some of it not even written by humans; and where the libraries these things have replaced, are fast being closed down.
Truth is closely related to integrity, which we should be able to expect from our politicians. But, while efforts are being made to address this through the Public Office (Accountability) Bill (recently delayed), others are increasingly falling prey to the persuasive generosity of corporate lobbyists – and even, some fear, to the influence of hostile nations. Likewise, we need to know that we can trust our media. Yet, poor regulation and the very small number of men who control the UK press are illustrative of a host of problems which have contributed to declining standards. The Bylines Network is one attempt to address this problem. We can’t fix everything that’s going wrong by ourselves and the danger is that declining trust means people will give up on all politicians and all media rather than trying to repair the situation.
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A tide of abuse
Sometimes even the worst of things come to seem so commonplace that we are no longer able to summon up the outrage with which we would once have greeted them. Sinead O’Connor once suggested, indelicately but importantly, “Jesus would have gone completely mental” on encountering even one case of child abuse.Yet, the scale of it within the Catholic Church – and a number of other religious movements with tremendous influence in people’s day-to-day lives – has had a numbing effect. After that, the likes of the Epstein scandal and the Harrods scandal have created a landscape in which many people feel hopeless about it.
We ought to respond to this by investing seriously in restructuring our institutions. Instead, we are seeing disturbing efforts by parts of the US right wing to write off sexual abuse – even when it involves children – as something that is bad, but ‘normal’, forgivable; where what matters is religiously-inspired repentance rather than not doing it in the first place.
There is an effort to get us used to having a convicted sexual abuser as US president, while elsewhere in the US efforts are underway to lower or even remove the age of consent to marriage. A willingness to overlook a history of sexual violence so as to concentrate on the ‘important issues’, even when well intended, risks normalising the idea that ruining the lives of vulnerable people, especially women and children, is not a major concern.
Bodily autonomy and national autonomy
Closely related to this is the issue of bodily autonomy. Increasingly bold opposition to trans people modifying their bodies (while intersex people continue to have their bodies modified in a similar manner without their consent) has proven an effective way to chip away at the social consensus around “my body, my choice”.
It’s no surprise that this has been swiftly followed in several countries by moves to further restrict or ban abortion and even by government interference with access to other medication like contraceptive pills. In the US, several women have found themselves arrested for having miscarriages, and a leading charity has warned that similar things could happen here.
When we begin to accept the loss of bodily autonomy as normal, it becomes easier to accept that nations, too, might be deemed to be unaware of what’s best for them. We’ve now seen the leader of Venezuela abducted and US oversight imposed on the country’s government. We’re also watching a committee of foreigners being imposed on Palestine to govern it with no indigenous input, with the implication that Palestinian people, who continue to face genocide, are (at least for the time being) incapable of governing themselves.
The plethora of countries being talked about as potential next targets for US conquest isn’t just about indecision – it’s about getting us used to the idea of the US (and perhaps powerful nations more generally) overriding the wishes of communities and simply taking what it wants. It is something we should expect so that we’re less likely to resist when it happens.
Some people are more equal than others
It’s no surprise to anyone that the first country Donald Trump’s US invaded was one whose residents mostly have brown skin. No more so than that the majority of those snatched off US streets by ICE, some of whom have disappeared after being taken to camps, were people of colour. The Trump regime is relying on racism to reduce the degree to which those not directly affected empathise with those who are.
This kind of division of society into innately deserving and undeserving classes doesn’t stop at US borders. It’s closely related to the racism that we see in the UK, which is part of what fuels hostility towards people seeking asylum (along with the myth that their numbers have increased). It has also made it easier for our governments to get away with making people stateless, presenting as normal the idea that people could have no right to citizenship of any country.
Racism in the US and the UK
Racism has existed in both countries in various forms for centuries. What changed during the 20th century was that it gradually came to be seen as unacceptable – at least as something that the state itself would not overtly endorse and that most people would either feel ashamed of or would at least attempt to conceal. We now have public figures increasingly attempting to normalise it again, directly or indirectly.
This is often accompanied by hostile rhetoric towards disabled people, LGBTQ+ people and religious minorities even within mainstream discourse. The notion that equality is a noble goal for society to work towards is under attack by people who want us to see a hierarchical society – in which everyone is ultimately more vulnerable – as normal. In doing so, they also undermine the idea that there are things we deserve – life, health, education, basic justice – not because of the details of who we are, but simply because we are human.
The centre cannot hold
Key to dealing with strategies like this, with attempts to shift the landmarks of our moral and social reality, is understanding that they cannot be debated or made subject to compromise. When we debate the right to bodily autonomy, we have already begun to give it away. When we seek to find a middle ground between truth and a lie, it will always be a lie. The only response to an agenda like this is to oppose it outright – and to do that we must be alert to it in its most insidious forms.
We are constantly reminded that the world is in a turbulent state, but such turbulence ultimately stems from shifting parameters – from the loss of a shared vision we can build towards; the loss of shared values. This isn’t about anything as trivial as the languages we speak, who or how we worship or even the countries we live in – it’s something far more fundamental. It is about defining what is normal, what is acceptable, who we are as a civilisation – and we can only win by repeatedly reaffirming our own fundamental sense of right and wrong.
More on world politics.
