Eating out the soul.

Two pieces from the LARB.  Both trace the evolution, or better devolution of American character and society.  The seeds have long been there and have been manifested in numerous ways. 

Darkness on the Edge of America looks at the work of Edward Hopper, a documentary painter if there ever was one. The author notes that one can trace throughout his oeuvre the loneliness and isolation of American modernity. 

His paintings mourn how, choking on the noxious fumes of the industrialized city and suffering under the deafening soundtrack of the cash register and other devices of commerce, the lonely American disappears into the background of buying and selling, and under the suffocation of big business and cold bureaucracy.

This author points out that the graphic rendering of the asphyxiated American spirit is demonstrated in a photo of Trump just minutes before he gave his UN speech where he was humiliated.  This is an image that should have wider currency and could benefit from a painterly treatment.

The second piece is an interview with Pankaj Mishra where he wraps the failed American project in the larger Liberal project that emerged from the convergence in time of the Enlightenment and imperialist Mercantilism.  For Mishra, the seeds of contemporary authoritarian populism, affecting all capitalist democracies, were incubated here all along.  

In tracing this, he doesn’t merely point to those voices outside this tradition, those who have faced the brunt of imperialist expansion, but also to those voices within these perpetrating societies.

The question is: how are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism? […] The historical origin of modern freedom has had certain unique preconditions which will never repeat themselves. Let us enumerate the most important of these. First, the overseas expansions. In the armies of Cromwell, in the French constituent assembly, in our whole economic life even today, this breeze from across the ocean is felt […] but there is no new continent at our disposal.

This quote from Max Weber in 1906 echoes my own feeling that the post war “grand bargain” of welfare state capitalism owed as much to colonialism as it did to its own political organization.  With the increasing transformation of colonization into its “neo” form, we see how this facilitated the disassembly of the postwar order. 

As we look at Trump/Brexit as the necessary outcome of the failed liberal regimes of Obama, the Clintons and Blair, in my view, we also can see this pattern in Canada.  Again, this took place in the reverse order of what we normally  expect, where it happened in this country prior to it happening in the US.  When the Democrats elevated Obama, the Liberal party selected Micheal Ignatieff as their rep. 

It would be hard to find a more dismal example of an intellectually bankrupt, morally compromised, out of touch leader who fits the image of the self-interested, detached cosmopolitan liberal than Ignatieff.  In the same way that folks fled HRC for Trump, enough folks here turned away or stayed home while others selected the meaner and unfunny Trump that is Harper.  Sadly, the neo-Obama that is Trudeau is just adding fuel to the fire.  If Pelosi is elected speaker, the same will apply down south.