FOLLOWING the previously unthinkable victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election everyone is trying to explain how and why he won, as if a right-wing demagogue taking power in a ‘democracy’ is an anomaly. On the contrary, individuals like Trump have spearheaded populist movements in the past, and will continue to do so long as the dominant political-economic order remains intact.

Trump’s success was based on the fact that he branded himself an ‘outsider’, untainted by the sins of Washington’s establishment. He managed to sustain this image — largely due to the media’s penchant for sensationalism — despite the fact that he is amongst the richest men in America, and has for decades been one of the faces of the very exclusionary political-economic order that he claims to stand against.

The fundamental contradiction between what Trump claims to be and what he is in practice finds a parallel in many right-wing populists all over the Euro-American world, most of whom are also genuine contenders for political power in societies that are now realising that the mythical ‘global village’ that everyone was celebrating not so long ago is not all that it was made out to be.

The rise of right-wing populism confirms that the growing disaffection within Western societies vis-à-vis ‘globalisation’ is not based on solidarity with the losers of the system but instead with a concern for how its winners are also feeling some of the pinch of global capitalism’s current travails. In the US, Europe and Australia, white-majority populations are taking aim at non-white immigrants who work more hours for less money, even though increased labour flows from poor to rich regions are only just a symptom of the problem rather than its actual cause.

We exist in a stupor of mindless consumption.

As the Bernie Sanders example illustrates, those on the left who are actually willing and able to call the system what it is are considered much more of a threat than ‘outsiders’ like Trump and therefore kept on the fringes of the intellectual and political mainstream. A handful of left challengers to the status quo have made it into government in some Western countries, only to find that they simply cannot bridge the gap between popular expectations and the imperatives of the system — Syriza in Greece being the most recent and notable example.

The situation in the non-Western world is as bad, if not worse. The Latin American ‘new left’ that was riding high until recently is also suffering from the vagaries of globalisation — while the fruits of the Morales and Chavez regimes in Bolivia and Venezuela have accrued to the historically oppressed segments of those countries’ populations, the overreliance on oil and gas in the developmental project has been exposed with the decline of petroleum prices in global commodity markets.

Asia and Africa can boast of no left-oriented regimes of note, with Nepal’s unified communist government struggling to contain internal discord, let alone cope with globalisation. The examples of China and Vietnam — where communist parties remain in power — demand more than just a cursory mention, but suffice it to say here that even though growth remains impressive, inequalities are rising whilst environmental degradation is fast emerging as a serious concern.

When one thinks of where the world is headed on the basis of where we stand at present, it is hard to look beyond the question of ecology. The bursting of the ‘globalisation’ bubble has confirmed that development under capitalism is always uneven, but it is now also painfully clear that capitalist development is unsustainable for humankind in the long run. Yet, as with every other major question in the contemporary era, ecology is paid little more than lip service, not to speak of the fundamental reordering of production and consumption patterns necessary to make the earth habitable for future generations.

In fact, the thick smog that descended upon the plains of Punjab earlier this month made clear that the earth is uninhabitable even now — even if such episodes are still sporadic.

Arguably, the most defining feature of the modern era has been humankind’s conviction that it has acquired a certain level of ‘rationality’ that both equips it to tame the natural environment and meet basic human needs and feed its recreational urges. Unsurprising­­ly, philosophical scepticism about this ‘rationality’ has heightened over the past few decades. Yet, on the whole, we exist in a stupor of mindless consumption, unwilling to defend basic freedoms and think critically about our world and its future in the face of state and corporate power (and bogeymen like ‘terrorism’).

Fifty years ago, a dogged anti-colonial thinker by the name of Aimé Césaire wrote that individuals like Hitler were not aberrations but in fact products of the very bourgeois ‘civilisation’ that decries such ‘outsiders’. Césaire’s warnings of a dark future are now reality. Do we still have time to avert a decline into barbarism?

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2016