AS images of a 62-year-old man firing indiscriminately on concert-goers in the quintessentially American city of Las Vegas went viral, the gloom and doom that was triggered within many progressive hearts with the shock victory of Donald Trump in last year’s American presidential poll intensified.

Mass shootings in America are a long-term malaise, while the protracted decline of US hegemony long precedes Trump. But an incident such as the one this week simply makes more tangible the feeling that the US — and the world — under Trump is sliding inexorably towards barbarism.

Many of us distance ourselves from the made-for-TV Trump reality show, especially when empathising with the pain his reactionary incompetence engenders in victims of natural and manmade disasters like the hurricane that ravaged Puerto Rico and the Las Vegas shooting. In fact, what is happening in the US is a reflection of larger global trends. America is, quite simply, a mirror to the rest of the world.

Most obviously, the rise of the ultra right continues unabated. The electoral gains made by far-right parties in many countries indicate deeper fault lines. Trump has been in power barely eight months but already reactionary sentiments latent in American society have come dramatically to the fore. Likewise, societies all over are characterised by deep and polarising internal conflicts between reactionaries and (increasingly embattled) progressives. With more and more ordinary people resenting a socioeconomic system that generates vulnerabilities of all kind, and with left-wing forces in relative disarray, right-wing exclusionary ideas continue to make inroads from America to Germany to India, while at home militants posing as the ‘Milli’ Muslim League win thousands of electoral votes.

We are smack in the middle of a deeply reactionary era.

The contemporary era is characterised by more and more spectacular violence. Here too, America holds up a mirror to the world, most notably via the heavily choreographed wars that Washington wages. Through unprecedented demonstrations of air power, the US celebrates violence in the name of ‘good’ and against ‘evil’. States all over are following suit, forever on the lookout for destructive technology at the cutting edge. At the height of the drone controversy here, our rulers asserted repeatedly that the problem with drones is not that they kill but that the US rather than the Pakistani military is doing the killing.

Parallel to the state’s violence is that of the so-called ‘non-state’ actor. Transnational right-wing networks engage in spectacular attacks precisely to draw attention to themselves. While left-wing political movements of yesteryear may also have engaged in targeted violence to highlight their causes, it is hard to escape the feeling that the ‘non-state’ violence of the contemporary era is more about dramatic effect and less about showing to the world an alternative vision of society. This is especially the case when one considers random acts of violence such as the one in Las Vegas. Here again the social ill is not America’s alone — we Pakistanis too tout a pervasive and largely uncontrolled ‘gun culture’, replete with a powerful lobby in favour of it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, contemporary society is characterised by a growing cynicism and alienation which makes a progressive coming together increasingly difficult. The characteristically American idea of individual liberty has, in an era where the ‘free’ market has acquired almost divine status, given rise to a debilitating crisis of political imagination. Everyone knows something is wrong but is too caught up in struggles to ensure individual mobility — or at the very least survival — that the only collective political idea that gains any support is that which dumbs the world down to ‘good versus evil’ and a technocratic one-size-fits-all idea of ‘development’.

So it is that people either put their faith in messiah-like figures — which, in a strange way, Trump is too — or turn their back on politics altogether. We in Pakistan have a long history of engaging in such fictions, and the rest of the world is now also jumping on the bandwagon.

All in all, America in decline is exposing uncomfortable truths about societies everywhere. For all the talk of democracy and human rights, we are smack in the middle of a deeply reactionary era of human history, what those on the left would call a counter-revolutionary age. I believe that progressives — if they choose to come together — do possess the intellectual means and the political will to get out of the mess. But this means eschewing prosaic models and binaries such as ‘civilised’ versus ‘uncivilised’, and discarding romantic notions that China, Russia or anyone else can wave a magic wand and lead us into an era beyond the failed project for a ‘New American Century’.

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

Published in Dawn, October 6th, 2017