[October 24th
marks the 75th anniversary of the official establishment of the
United Nations. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five histories connected
to the UN, leading up to this weekend post on global interconnectedness in October
2020.]
On two ways to
analyze our 21st century global moment, and what lies beyond both of
them.
Back in the
early days of the Trump era, when I could still write the semi-hopeful phrase “presumptive
GOP nominee Donald Trump,” I wrote a
piece for my (at the time) HuffPost
gig in which I used Benjamin Barber’s somewhat dated but still relevant book
Jihad
vs. McWorld (1995) to analyze the rise of right-wing nationalist
movements like Trump & MAGA, Brexit, Marine Le Pen in France,
and others. If we parallel those movements to Al Qaeda, ISIS, and right-wing
Islamic terrorism, as I tried to in that piece and still would, I think it’s
fair to say that a great deal of what has happened around the world in the 21st
century’s first two decades can be explained by such reactionary nationalist
movements. Here in the United States, the Obama-era rallying cry of “I want my country back!”
was a direct predecessor to Trump and MAGA, and I think that same phrase
defines this vision around the world, whether it’s Brexiteers clinging to an
imaginary, endangered Britain or Islamic extremists seeking to expel “the West”
from their countries.
At the same
time, another prominent global trend over these same decades, and especially throughout
the 2010s, has been mass, progressive protests, against those reactionary
movements but also and especially against longer-standing status quos. From Occupy
Wall Street to the Arab
Spring to the July
2019 protests in Puerto Rico and those that rocked the entire
globe in late 2019, these mass uprisings have reflected (often) youthful
communities and movements that are part of neither neoliberal corporate
globalism nor reactionary nationalism (to use Barber’s two categories). The
late spring/summer of 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests that began with the
George Floyd murder in Minneapolis but transformed into something much broader
and more widespread, both in the United States (and indeed all
fifty of them at once, making them the only protest movement in American
history to achieve that milestone) and once again around
the world, make clear that this youth-driven global phenomenon is only
deepening as we move into the 2020s, and perhaps will dominate this decade as
fully as right-wing nationalism did the prior one.
Unless climate
change and its increasingly overt and destructive effects do. I worry that both
the global pandemic (which is undoubtedly connected
to climate change) and these opposing global social and political movements
have diverted our attention from what has long been and certainly remains the most
pressing issue facing the entire world. But on the other hand, what has
long been absent is a truly widespread, collective recognition of the reality
of climate change and its effects, the kind of shared engagement without which
it’s impossible to truly begin considering and implementing the kinds of changes
and policies necessary to confront and begin mitigating this crisis. Part of
the reason for that absence is precisely the reactionary movements—a desire to
return to a mythic past makes it difficult to deal with the present, much less
address an onrushing future. So perhaps these global protests and activisms can
become part of systemic change, not just when it comes to issues of race and justice
(although yes please), but also and entirely relatedly when it comes to the
changing planet on which, as my friends Dire Straits put it, we still
must “find a way to be/One world in harmony.”
Halloween series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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