The only show in town

We're all trapped in here with you

Hi friends,

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In the years 1787-1795, all Europe, and soon all the world, was passenger to the decisions of a few hundred men in Paris. The first of these men were aristocrats, trying to recapture the state from the monarchy. Then they were moderate bourgeoisie, brought together by a nascent ideology—liberalism. Then the Jacobins, led by Robespierre and backed by the inchoate but immense power of the sans-culottes, brought the world into modernity.

None of them had much control over the situation, either, not least Robespierre, who had in fact no formal executive powers, and who instead depended on the fervour of the Paris masses. For all his zeal, he was the temporary conduit for forces far beyond him. And when the sans-culottes became discontented with the economic pressures of war, Robespierre found himself isolated. By July 1794 he was in the guillotine. That was only a year after his power had peaked. All of them, from Robespierre to Marie Antoinette to Saint-Just, all the way down to the anonymous Parisian poor, were caught in the great impersonal tide of history. Only Napoleon, a generation later, can be said to have had something like control over, or responsibility for, the events of his time.

Still, they were at least on the ground to see history happen—were, in some sense, part of the action. They’re the closest thing to agents in the whole story. But outside Paris the agrarian countryside began, and the peasants there were utterly subject to decisions made in the city. Their illiteracy didn’t help, nor their social position, nor the sheer size of the world. In an era without the train or the telegraph, they may as well have been on the far side of the planet.

Even worse, most of the people who would be affected by the decisions in Paris were on the other side of the planet. Some knew it more than others. If the characters of Jane Austen seemed to be totally uninterested in the world outside their garden walls, others waited anxiously for the news, like Toussaint L’Ouverture in San Domingo. The ideas fermenting in Paris were the ideas he would depend on as he began the emancipation of his people. The citizens of Königsberg, it is said, accustomed to the regularity of Immanuel Kant’s daily strolls, knew for the first time of this shift in world history when the philosopher one afternoon failed to appear.

‘It was not a comfortable phase to live through,’ wrote Eric Hobsbawm, ‘for most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was a phenomenon as awful and irreversible as the first nuclear explosion, and all history had been permanently changed by it.’

Both the revolution and the bomb changed everything around them and everything that came after them. But the peasants of Europe and the citizens of Hiroshima/Nagasaki had no say over what happened to them. Nor did the European nobles, for that matter, or Emperor Hirohito, the POWs on the Burmese railway, or the slaves of the Caribbean.

They were effected either way. The nobility of Europe hung on for a bit longer, but their position was now terminal. After the bomb, the Emperor soon renounced his own divinity and became a ceremonial figurehead. Those POWs who were healthily enough to travel made it home. And the slaves of what is now Haiti took their chance to launch the first successful slave rebellion since Spartacus.¹

Toussaint

One of the strange effects of modern nationalism is the way it causes otherwise smart people to deny the fact of the rest of the world. It seems to create in their minds an idea, surely wishful, that borders are containers, holding back the events that occur inside country from everyone else. This impulse props up all the time, across political identities, and across societies. When I lived in China, the CCP was pushing hard on the concept of “China’s internal affairs”. The Party felt that the attention we foreigners gave to Xinjiang, Tibet, or Hong Kong was illegitimate. It was their business, not ours.

The glimpse I got of Xinjiang in 2018 inoculated me forever against the idea of “internal affairs”. No defensible notion of sovereignty allows the state to do what it likes to its own people—that, famously, is one lesson of the Holocaust. And there is the base fact that nothing is ever contained—what happens in one place always ripples outwards. (That is why so many young men travelled to Spain during the Civil War to fight in the International Brigades.)

I took this somewhere in Xinjiang, 2018

When I knocked doors in New Hampshire for Bernie Sanders in 2019, Australia was burning in the Black Summer. For many, my “involvement” in US politics was outrageous. At the doors I relied on a simple message: US leadership on climate change would decide the severity of Australian fires in the future.

That argument was convincing to Americans every time I made it. Give Americans a chance to consider the far reaching consequences of their country, and they tend to understand our interest. And yet we foreigners continue to feel squeamish about the attention we give the US. We here in Australia—and for that matter, those in Britain and Nigeria and India and Sweden, or anywhere with internet—often feel a reflexive embarrassment regarding our obsession with American news. Sometimes we mock each other for it. When we do we surely are mocking ourselves.

With half a glance at the history of the world, all this attention starts to look perfectly reasonable. It’s not just that the US culture industry, that juggernaut of capital, presses politics-as-entertainment down our throats, whether we should want it or not. And it is not merely that American political life is especially structured as television drama—team sports, perhaps, or reality TV—so that it makes for genuine entertainment.

It is that we are subjects of history, are subjected to history, and the decisive historical moments of our time continue to occur on US soil. As the world fragments into multipolarity, and as China and India and Nigeria and everyone else rise in power and wealth, this only becomes more true. The steady march of rival powers might be momentous, but it does not create so many Moments. The unpredictable jerks of the US, on the other hand, come in the form of rapid and distinct events, each with the latent potential to trigger world-historical ramifications. The US, in its death throes, is swerving into a volatility that actually is as significant as it is spectacular.

Tierney L. Cross / The NYT

More than anything, it produces, and propagates, ideas. It doesn’t help that the Americans speak a form of English. Here in Australia, white nationalists relying on a diet of US social media walk the streets. Recently, about 40 of them violently attacked Camp Sovereignty, the First Nations protest camp. Meanwhile, in the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is surging in popularity. It copy-pastes large sections of Trump’s agenda. 100,000 anti-immigration protestors recently marched in London. In one brain-breaking moment, a cohort of right-wing Maori led a haka in memory of Charlie Kirk.

Which is to say that the US remains, for our sins, significant. Its significance derives from some combination of three factors: the sheer size of the country (the magnitude of its effects), the unpredictability of the country (the volatility of its events), and the country’s connectedness to the rest of the world (its propensity for contagion). From all that comes the sheer weight of contingency. There are butterflies in the Amazon changing the course of history, but in North America an injured, dying Mothra thrashes around, sending across the oceans storms that the rest of us have no choice but to withstand. Why not keep a weathered eye?

One final thought. I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, I think because history is a source of zen. It asks humility. The macro sweep of events hardly absolves us of responsibility at our micro levels, but forces us to be a little more realistic about, and therefore a little more accepting of, our own limited power. In that way the scale of time is kind of relief, at least for me. The scale of it all helps the ego let go of the panic of the present. To maintain sanity, and energy, and effectiveness, we’d do well to remember that the currents of the moment are surely too powerful for any one of us to control.

1. The French, Spanish, and Americans worked hard in the following years to make that success short-lived.