Bleak Days Ahead – But No Room for Despair

This pivot will not work, and it won’t work for the simple reason that it is obvious bullshit that the public easily perceives. Starmer, whose entire political brand is premised upon the idea that he is “principled,” manifestly lacks principles and, when it comes to cultural or identity issues, is liable to fold in whichever direction he feels makes him seem most electable. His vacuity and political ineptitude are glaring, and, because of them, his base of support is crumbling beneath his feet. His premiership is surely numbered already, and, in the wake of his failure, the far right seems likely to sweep to power in the years to come.

Across the English Channel, in France, Emanuel Macron, the once shiny, handsome poster boy of European centrism, has, through his actions, rendered France effectively ungovernable, priming it now for what seems to be an inevitable far-right takeover. Macron, perhaps more than any other European leader, embodies the total decline of centrism throughout Europe, his ideology becoming increasingly incoherent and his tendency for authoritarian action deployed more readily as time goes by. But this same phenomenon is seen everywhere on the continent, with hapless centrist parties collapsing with alarming haste.

In Brussels, the center of the European Union itself, E.U. leaders and technocrats reveal themselves every day to be hypocrites and fools, their idiocy personified most aptly within the singular figure of Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s chief foreign policy official, whose remarkable ignorance of basic history tends to cause minor scandals here and there. Kallas has publicly expressed disbelief that the Chinese and Russians were ever involved in defeating the Axis forces in World War II—they most certainly were—while, for whatever it’s worth, she’s also pissed off the Irish, belittling its people’s desire to retain military neutrality as a mere quirk of a nation that has never experienced oppression in its modern history. Some of her statements are so wildly ill-informed that one can’t help but wonder if she’s actively a saboteur, because, really, that would almost be less frightening than the prospect that someone this obviously unsuitable has managed to obtain such a powerful position over Europe’s affairs.

The word “kakistocracy” is a fine one. “A government,” as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, “that is ruled by the least suitable, able, or experienced people in a state or country.” There is a very particular sort of joy in encountering a word that so tightly captures such a complicated notion, and, embedded within those twelve letters, is the condition of our time. We live in a kakistocracy. The centrist political leadership of the West, whose ideologies were forged decades ago, in the giddy haze of post-Cold War hubris, are no longer fit for purpose. Their ideas are spent. Harris, Starmer, Macron, Kallas, Von Der Leyen—grey icons of an old world, they have failed their people and opened up a great, yawning void that is being filled by the far right. This, for the foreseeable future, will regrettably mean a lot of political and social pain, but, in the long run, the project of the far right will crumble, too.

Argentina’s so-called “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, while, admittedly, still proving to be a formidable electoral force, has already been bailed out for $20 billion by an ideologically-driven, friendly Trump administration, after his turbo-charged neoliberal program of austerity and privatization predictably failed to stabilize the country’s faltering economy. Britain’s Reform party, which is fundamentally a neoliberal, Thatcherite entity, with a dash more overt racism thrown in, will pursue a similar program of cutting back the state, while deporting huge numbers of migrants, and, it, too, will fail on its promise to restore British living standards. It will fail because it will do nothing to address the actual problems within the capitalist system, nor the existential threat of climate change, and, in fact, will make those problems worse. These right-wing, corporatized regimes will doubtlessly become more authoritarian and violent as crises deepen, as Trump is so readily exhibiting, and that is a terrifying prospect, but they will become more unstable as they do. Just look at Israel.

Even as Israel’s crazed, genocidal government has furthered its Zionist ambitions—destroying much of Gaza and slaughtering so many of its unwanted Palestinian people; expanding its settlements in the West Bank; extending its borders into neighboring countries; and weakening its main foe of Iran—it has, also, prepared the ground for its own undoing. Gripped by genocidal fervor, Israel has become increasingly isolated internationally, even as its Western allies continue to offer their fawning support, and it has become a society powered by ceaseless war and bloodletting. As presently constituted, Israel, as the title of renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s new book puts it, is “on the brink,” a pariah state that cannot go on as it has been. That is cold comfort for the Palestinians who, in this moment, regardless of whatever empty ceasefire is ostensibly in place, continue to be slaughtered, but, in the long term, Israel’s ceaseless violence will render the state hollow. It, as with all far-right regimes, will eventually fail.

Things, plainly, are bad, and they are going to get worse. The climate crisis, above all else, will ensure as much. We are on track for a 2.5-degree increase in temperatures above pre-industrial levels by the century’s end, which, as one climate scientist put it to The Guardian, will condemn us to a “semi-dystopian future” of famine, water shortages, economic collapse, war, mass displacement, heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods. Despair, frankly, is entirely warranted, but to succumb to it totally would be to miss the little slivers of light that, always, cut through the darkness.

In Britain, widespread exasperation with the establishment and the rising far right is, at last, beginning to take electoral shape, not, as expected, in the form of Jeremy Corbyn, whose new party with Zarah Sultana infuriatingly continues to pathologically feck itself over, but in Zack Polanski, whose leadership of the Green Party, while still new, is so far proving to be extremely impressive. The Greens are unlikely to take power come the next election, but they are, at least, beginning to serve as an electoral wing of a wider resistance that will not accept Britain’s deterioration at the hands of increasing inequality and racist agitation.

Little Ireland, my home country, just elected Catherine Connolly as its new president. A socialist explicitly opposed to Europe’s increasing militarism, Connolly’s power as president will be extremely limited—the Irish presidency is largely ceremonial, albeit with some key powers vested in it—but her success, at least symbolically, demonstrates that masses of Irish people reject the current European orthodoxy driving the continent to war and ruin. She is an expression of the very same sentiment that has defined every pro-Palestine march over the last two years, in Ireland as elsewhere, in which tens of thousands of people have regularly taken to the streets to stand against their own governments’ complicity in the Gaza genocide. Ordinary people, while unable to end the atrocities, have nonetheless laid their bodies on the line week in and week out, refusing to be cowed by the authoritarian and violent states that seek to crush them.

We’re in for a rough ride over the next little while. Power, by and large, is not with the left. Progressive media, like dear old Splinter, is suffering under the weight of AI and a general breakdown in attention spans and literacy, while broader momentum is, clearly, with corporate power and quasi-fascists. But little successes happen all the time. The general vibe of the moment, as the crises build up, may feel extremely bleak, but still people continue to stand up for themselves and each other, driven by some ambient sense that positive change can and will happen. People, despite the shitshow exploding around them, will keep resisting, and they’ll do it because they have to.