During a seminar in Oklahoma last October, a student sporting a “Make America Great Again” cap explained to historian Rick Perlstein why people around him voted for Trump. “For those people who have no political voice and come from states that do not matter,” the student said, “the best thing they can do is try to send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system”.
The ascent of a reality TV star as president of “the Free World” has certainly had a wrecking ball effect. But 2016 disrupted more than just liberal democracy in the United States. It also buried “never again” in Aleppine dust, saw Britain exit the EU, and made “post-truth” Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year. Behind many of these developments was a resentment of the elites, a disdain for experts, angst over economic misfortune, fear of foreigners and a retreat into tribe. Brexit and Trump were both expressions of discontent with a system that many believe has left them behind. But beyond facile talk of “economic anxieties”, few plausible explanations have emerged as to what led voters in Britain and the US to these extremes.
In Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra offers a panoramic survey of the populist wind roiling the world and a genealogy of the ressentiment propelling it. Lucid, incisive and provocative, the book may be the most ambitious effort yet to diagnose our social condition. With erudition and insight, it explains why movements from below are entrusting their future to paternalistic demagogues in the expectation of rewards from above.
With terror and immigration looming large in the rhetoric of neo-nativists, Islam and Muslims have often been portrayed as the irreconcilable other. But as Mishra notes, this presumes a West with a monolithic culture and coherent values. Western culture is varied, with room enough for both the Tea Party and MoveOn; its values can accommodate both Anders Breivik and Jon Stewart. The clash is more within than between civilisations. And the questions that have riven civilisations are not exclusive. The most inescapable among them is modernity – and it affects all.
It is to the 18th century response to modernity that Mishra traces the roots of our current woes. The West’s encounter with modernity was fraught with unprecedented upheavals in the political, economic and social realms. It was attended by mass migration, war and genocide. And with the rest of the world now catching up – a world first exposed to modernity through European imperialism – “large parts of Asia and Africa are now plunging deeper into the West’s own fateful experience of that modernity”.
Seen in this context, a group like ISIL is not sui generis; it has “deep intellectual and psychological affinities” with radicals who emerged across the West in the 19th and the early-20th centuries. They include “the aesthetes who glorified war, misogyny and pyromania; the nationalists who accused Jews and liberals of rootless cosmopolitanism and celebrated irrational violence; and the nihilists, anarchists and terrorists who flourished in almost every continent against a background of cosy political-financial alliances, devastating economic crises and obscene inequalities”.
Mishra paints vivid portraits of these malcontents, from the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who created the prototype of a fascist state in Fiume, to the Russian nihilist Sergey Nechayev whose revolutionary adventures culminating in fratricide provided Dostoyevsky with one of his most memorable characters.
Since the Second World War, mainly through American influence, liberal democracy has flourished across western Europe. But there is nothing inherently liberal or democratic about western culture, Mishra writes. Its dalliance with totalitarianism was no aberration. It “crystalized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century”.
The West has always presented itself as a bearer of Enlightenment ideals. Its distinct “way of life” has had its evangelists. Beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers, many have advocated for progress through science, reason, and commerce – and force, if necessary. Voltaire famously supported Russian empress Catherine (the Great) in her attempts to foist modernity upon Turkey and Poland (wiping the latter off the map).
Against this current of enforced modernisation stood Rousseau, an outsider, a parvenu, who scoffed at the air of moral superiority cultivated by his debauched peers and instead championed “the people” within whose general will the unmoored individual could find autonomy while subsuming his identity in a glorified community. Rejecting intellectualism, resenting elites, scorning the foreigner, this type of tribalism responded to psychic wounds that went beyond purely material needs. Loss of status or identity and desire for glory and recognition was always a greater motivator.
This, Mishra writes, created an enduring appeal for Rousseau’s ideas among the defeated and the left-behind. The first to embrace Rousseau were the Germans, who, not yet a nation, assimilated his ideas into a Romantic nationalism which, in conscious opposition to French civic nationalism, celebrated community and service. From philosophers like Fichte and Herder, his ideas were relayed on to poets like Goethe and Schiller. And having helped Germans coalesce into a nation, they were adapted by nation-builders farther afield, from Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy to Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. Percolating down into the writings of stateless intellectuals, they helped to imagine nations into existence from Italy to India, Poland to Pakistan.
Rooted in existential politics, however, these ideas could lend themselves as easily to progressive causes as to reactionary ones. If Romantic nationalism has led to fascistic imperialism, it has also helped defeated nations resist colonial domination. Sometimes the same ideas have found radically different interpretations in the same country.
Nothing illustrates this better than the case of Gandhi and Vinayak Savarkar, the founder of the Hindutva movement and a conspirator in Gandhi’s eventual assassination. Both men were influenced by Mazzini but each put his writings to different use. For Gandhi they represented universal ideas of community and service, for Savarkar they became a licence for chauvinism and intolerance. And while Gandhi enjoyed all the early triumphs, it is Savarkar’s ideas that have come to prevail in India today. Narendra Modi is a product of Savarkar’s movement. And his support has come not just from the downtrodden, but also from India’s professional classes, its vast diaspora and the super-rich who see in his machismo a vision of the glory that they feel they have been denied.
This mix of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement has been at the root of this politics of ressentiment. A crisis of democracy has presented demagogues from India to Britain, Hungary to the US, with an opportunity to exploit the “generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness” and turn it into a plan of action. They do it by stoking xenophobia, demonising minorities, attacking the media and railing against experts and “the establishment”. In its more extreme form, it also fuels the obtrusive violence of ISIL, which, regardless of its medieval references, is a product of modernity.
The glorification of violence is not something new, Mishra shows. “Ideas ripen quickly”, wrote Mazzini, “when nourished by the blood of martyrs.” His disciple Alfredo Oriani insisted, “blood will always be the best warm rain for great ideas”. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, spoke of the “voluptuousness of a great idea and of martyrdom”. The German poet Ernst Arndt preached a “bloody hatred of the French” to “smoulder as the religion of the German folk”. The dramatist Heinrich von Kleist imagined smashing a French child’s head against a church pillar.
And this was long before the horror of the two world wars.
The “will to power and craving for violence as existential experience” that characterizes ISIL was long ago foreseen by the French revolutionary Georges Sorel. But beyond the myriad pathologies it represents, writes Mishra, ISIL is also counter-culture and a bureaucracy. The “gruesome reciprocity” of its spectacular violence and the grim aesthetic of its staged executions is also a response to the snuff videos of CIA drone attacks and the carceral pageantry of orange jumpsuits debuted in Guantanamo. If it revels in its criminality, it has ample precedents.
Age of Anger is a bracing attempt to take the political pulse of an age. It is sweeping in scope and refreshingly free of dogma. But its broad canvas necessarily leads to gaps and omissions, some of them vital. The question of power, for example, remains unexplored. But by recognising the existential roots of politics and tracing its antecedents, Mishra has made perhaps the most valuable contribution to the understanding of our turbulent age.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Stirling.