Weimar Redux
Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan
During his career, Robert D. Kaplan has gone through no small efforts in his reporting. Bic pen in hand, he has traveled to war zones and failed states to paint book-length narratives of the world as it is. His colorfully composed portrayals pull together travelogue, demography, history, geography, politics, and literature, giving the reader a comprehensive and trustworthy picture. That is why I am a longstanding Kaplan fan.
Waste Land, A World in Permanent Crisis, Kaplan’s latest book, appears to me to be mainly a cobbled-together potpourri of previously published material from The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The National Interest, and The New Statesman. It was nonetheless worth my time.
If the book has a message, it is that utopianism and mobs are dangerous. Second, if you face the choice between fascism and anarchy, choose neither. Lastly, naivety and self-delusion in politics – I would add in life – come at too steep a price.
Today’s international political arena is neither unipolar nor multipolar but something approximating dystopian. Instagram addiction is rampant; just about everyone is mesmerized by social media. Meanwhile, the world drowns in cultural nihilism and moral relativism. Across still-viable nation states and shithole countries alike, the globe is experiencing another Weimar epoch. Will Weimar’s nerve-racking chaos push us again toward demagogic autocratic leaders and authoritarian systems that offer misleadingly simple solutions and the promise of order?
In Waste Land, Kaplan has reprised the Soviet-era dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to pound home the message that order is a prerequisite for freedom. And Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored to make the point that “the most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”
The danger of righteous mobs — and global interconnectedness — was highlighted just after Black Saturday, October 7, 2023, as pro-Islamists and illiberal progressives hit the streets, subways, and campuses. These mobs, catalyzed by social media, were smugly wrapped in their keffiyehs and COVID-era facemasks. They had sniffed “Zionist” blood and brayed for more. Others who took part were gormless more than evil, but relished being part of the street theatre.
What is a mob? “A strange, special being, both human and inhuman, where each individual was released from his usual responsibility and was multiplied in strength,” Solzhenitsyn explained. Later in the book, Kaplan shows how a mob can morph from street thuggery to digital and social media terrorization, and how journalists at prestigious media outlets and academics at Ivy League universities can become enmeshed in groupthink. Clearly, human nature has not evolved as fast as technology. Hence, we run in wolf packs.
Paradoxically, mobs and civilization are interdependent. On the one hand, civilization asks us to suppress parochialism and tribalism, and civilized society is tied to cosmopolitan cities and metropolises, according to Kaplan. Yet, cities are also the places where mobs are mobilized to “globalize the intifada,” for instance. Citing two pre-Internet though prescient Jewish crowd experts, Elias Canetti and Hannah Arendt, Kaplan informs that “the mob is made up of lonely people” whose “fear of being touched” by a stranger is abated only within the crowd.
“Postmodern technology – first newspapers and radio, now X and Facebook – has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd.”
And for feral “virtual” crowds.
So, plainly, Kaplan does not buy into Steven Pinker’s kumbaya take in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that human nature is evolving in a nonviolent direction. If anything, order becomes more difficult in what Kaplan has called “an increasingly claustrophobic world,” especially where an “ever-growing number of young males in the most economically and politically fragile societies” are pulled into extremism and violence.
Yesterday, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research issued a poll that contains a stunning revelation: some 580 days into the October 7 War, with Gaza devastated, 50,000 dead (according to Palestinian authorities), violence and its attendant hunger, suffering and dislocation loosed from Syria to Lebanon and from the Judea and Samaria to Iran – half of the Palestinian Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza would do it all over again. “[Only] half of the Palestinians in the current poll view Hamas’ decision to carry out the October 7 attack as ‘correct.’” For the simple reason that “the attack and the following war have placed the Palestinian issue at the center of global attention.”
Sigmund Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents, saying that human nature is instinctively belligerent. My own Freud takeaway is that the best hope for any of us is to live in an orderly polity that rests on lawful institutions, a political culture where elites inculcate tolerance, and a representative (not pure majority rule) democracy. Sadly, the Palestinian Arabs are situated light years in the opposite direction. Alas, Israel under Binyamin Netanyahu’s post-Jabotinsky Likud and his Templar and Haredi partners is being pulled into a direction that is gradually recasting our polity in the image of our enemies: lethal, fanatic, and apocalyptic.
Speaking of October 7, another takeaway from the book is that decision makers are prone to misread where strategic dangers loom. We Israelis saw how Netanyahu was deluded into thinking that Hamas had no interest in making war on Israel. Americans saw how, after 9/11, the George W. Bush administration went to war against an amorphous phenomenon it called “terrorism.” One stumble led to another. After the forever wars under Bush, America was in a rapid decline. Barack Obama’s devotion to multilateralism seemed like the perfect calming agent. He huffed some sanctions Putin’s way to show displeasure at Russia’s annexation of Crimea, blinked when Assad used poison gas in Syria, and was craven when the mullahs deigned to take his offer of an Iran nuclear deal.
Kaplan avoids piling on Trump – the book came out just as America’s Greatest President Ever retook office. Trump is a windbag. Whether he is a fascist is arguable. Kaplan does tell us that fascism is the bullies’ ideology. While classical liberalism and conservatism are willing to entertain reasonable contending ideas, Trumpians and illiberal progressives will not. Once a system falls into authoritarianism, the removal of a strongman is more likely to spur pandemonium than Madisonian democracy.
Beyond their efforts to concentrate power in a strongman, Trumpians have no coherent worldview, for selfishness, boisterousness, and crassness hardly qualify. However, illiberal progressives do embrace an ideology that encompasses utopianism, DEI, ending criminal incarceration, dogmatic climatism, advocacy of childhood gender affirmation rights, and no borders. Taken together, they represent “the final, deepest degradation of reason.” A quote that Kaplan produces concerning absolute adherence to any ideology, which comes from the late geopolitical theorist Robert Strausz-Hupé.
The downside of Waste Land is the difficulty in discerning an overarching theme, even within chapters. It’s a whirlwind of ideas that I, as a Kaplan aficionado, am willing to put up with. However, if you are approaching Kaplan for the first time, I would start with one of his other fine books. My favorites include: The Arabists, Balkan Ghosts, The Coming Anarchy, and The Good American.