‘This is the way the world ends.’, said T.S. Eliot, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’. Watching the news these days it is hard not to think that we are witnessing if not the end of the world at least the end of a particular phase of history, an era of neoliberal globalisation dominated by the United States of America. There is banging and whimpering aplenty but, switching compulsively from The BBC to CNN to Aljazeera to Euronews trying to make sense of what is going on, I hear other noises too.
There are times when I need some respite from the news channels with their relentless documentation of new waves of awfulness, rising hysteria and competing explanations and rationalisations (jarringly interspersed with ads for trivia) and just about everybody I speak to these days seems to feel the same. In January, in that curious still time when the holidays are over but it feels premature to start chasing people up for answers to questions that were put on hold before Christmas, I could not find anything else I wanted to watch in those down times when TV watching is the least exhausting thing to do, so I revisited a list of programmes I never got round to watching at the time they were first aired and settled, for who knows what unconscious reason, on the West Wing.
First broadcast in September 1999, this must have been produced just at the time of Clinton’s impeachment (at the beginning of that year) and was perhaps intended to sanitise his image and shore up public faith in US democracy. It certainly didn’t prevent Bush being elected in 2000 (albeit by a contentious whisker) but could perhaps have played some role in Obama’s 2008 victory (the series ran until May, 2006, though I must confess I haven’t got much beyond Series 2).
I was expecting it to be a cynical satire, along the same lines as the BBC’s The Thick of It, first broadcast in 2005, and, so I understood, strongly influenced by it. So I was surprised by the extent to which, notwithstanding its apparently detached up-close observations of the machinations of press officers and political advisers at the centre of government, it is romantic, not to say schmaltzy, in its view of democracy, veneration of the office of the presidency and conviction that America is a force for good in the world. Indeed, much of it could have come straight from the mid 20th century cold war playbook. Take, for example, the tear-jerking episode in which the apparently hard-boiled deputy chief of staff in the White House discovers that a dead homeless person was wearing a purple heart won in the Korean War and breaks the rules to organise a full state funeral with military honours for him, for the benefit of his brother, also a hobo.
I could go on, but I won’t. Three weeks of toggling between the manipulated news from the real White House in 2024 and its fictional representation a quarter of a century ago, have brought to the surface a series of questions that might not otherwise have occurred to me and provided a new lens through which to view the evolving news.
Some of these concern the ideological underpinnings of neoliberalism. There is one episode, for example, in which an exasperated Democrat (who has been asked to debate with a group of protestors – presented as a baying mob – outside the World Trade Centre) expostulates, as if it’s so bleeding obvious you shouldn’t even need to say it, ‘Don’t they understand that it’s free trade that stops wars?’, an episode I happened to watch last week just after the USA and UK announced they were bombing Houthis for attacking container ships in the Red Sea. Hmm.
It is not just the relationship between war and global trade that is problematised. There is also the tricky question of the relationship between politics and the rule of law. The West Wing presents politicians, including the President, as terrified of being legally prosecuted and indicted by grand juries and going to tortuous lengths to establish legal justifications for any decisions that are made, right down to issues such as the withholding of information about their health. (This is still very much a live issue, as was evidenced last week by the outcry caused by the Pentagon’s failure to disclose to the White House that US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had been given hospital treatment for prostate cancer.) However it is also the case that the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court is an explicitly political choice made by the President. So the President sits simultaneously both under and over the law in a contradiction that might go some way towards explaining some current developments in US politics
Yesterday, CNN reported at length on Donald Trump’s defiant reaction to being fined the extraordinarily large sum of $83.3 Million for defaming E. Jean Carroll in a New York court. He (and his press spokesperson) insisted that this was yet another example of the law being used unconstitutionally to hound an innocent man and that, furthermore, that’s what you would expect in New York because it is a Democrat state. The tone CNN adopted in reporting this followed the standard Democratic Party line, which is also that of the majority of public opinion in Europe and much of the rest of the world (to judge by Euronews and Aljazeera) which is that this represents a failure to respect the rule of law, rendering Trump a dangerous person unfit for public office.
While broadly in agreement with this view, it does seem to me important to note that Trump may have come by his opinion quite rationally, based on his own experience. As President he appointed no less than three of the nine Supreme Court judges in the USA, so he has first-hand knowledge of their likelihood of being swayed by their personal political opinions in arriving at their decisions. That very lack of objectivity was why he appointed them! Furthermore, he inhabits a world in which, just as electoral victory goes to those with the largest campaign funds, so legal victory goes to those who can afford the most, and most expensive, lawyers. This too is illustrated in the West Wing in an extended plotline about the size of the legal budget of the tobacco lobby. This contradiction is not new, and neither is the public playing out of victim/aggressor dynamics in the portrayal of political leaders, but it is quite possible that the 2024 general election might be the moment that it becomes important enough to tilt US history onto a new path.
There are many other common threads, including the obsessive attention paid to the precise wording of the US Constitution, conferring an almost divine prescience and infallibility onto the Founding Fathers, replacing rational discussion with the kinds of abstruse interpretation more usually found in theology. This is not new either, but might we be entering a new phase where such hair-splitting arguments suddenly start not only to seem ridiculous to the rest of the world but for it to become permissible to express that sense of ridiculousness?
When America was the undisputed leading economic power in the world, it behoved the rest of us to respect its values, or at least pay lip service to them, and to follow its progress and judge its behaviour just as carefully as servants anticipate the changing moods of their masters. Is that hegemony now being shaken? And, if so, how will we even know? The management of the mainstream media by politicians gives us a filtered view but even this filtered view is increasingly contradictory. Meanwhile the cacophony of information (real and manufactured) from other sources is deafening.
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