Halloween came late this year. The undead roamed the Earth on November 5th instead of October 31st. But the timing was nonetheless apt. The festival marks the slippery time between two states, summer gone, not yet winter. There is a space in which all boundaries become porous. Terrifying forces are free to enter the mundane world.
And this is what is happening to us. We are in a neither/nor time, an era of vast but incomplete transitions, each one of them dizzying for democracy.
First, there’s the carbon transition. Even before our species was formed, our ancestors had begun to burn carbon to create energy. Our generation must change a habit built up over two million years.
This transition has political consequences. It unleashes a backlash from the carbon producers who are still immensely wealthy and powerful. It gives them an incentive to discredit science. And it disturbs ordinary people whose lives are built around the availability of cheap petrol – gas prices loomed large in the US election.
Second, there’s the demographic transition. Most developed societies are ageing and need inward migration to replenish their workforces. Ideas of “white” identity are under pressure. In the US, non-Hispanic white people will be in the minority by 2045. In the political realm, this facilitates reactionary narratives of invasion, conquest and loss of identity.
Third, there’s the gender transition. In principle, this is one that should have been completed a long time ago. In most developed societies, women are at least as well educated as men and economic conditions demand that they work outside the home. But in reality, women are still stuck with most of the labour of care and many men are susceptible to the idea that equality is a zero sum game – if women are gaining, men must be losing.
Here, too, there is a political opening. The idea of a return to the old patriarchal family headed by the male breadwinner is appealing to men who see it as a reassertion of natural superiority. But it also appeals to a significant minority of women who feel conned by a promise of liberation that has not been fulfilled.
Fourth, there’s the virtual transition. We’re in a period of extremely rapid technological change whose pace is, if anything, speeding up. Societies that have barely begun to get to grips with the effects of online communications now face the unleashing of generative AI systems controlled by a relatively small tech oligarchy.
These technologies have two big political effects. One is on the whole idea of what information is and where it comes from – voters now have individually tailored information spaces generated for them by algorithms that feed them ever more extreme and tribalised content. The other is that vast amounts of new wealth are being channelled to the oligarchs. Estimates of the wealth that will flow from the use of AI in the next six years range from $15 trillion to $20 trillion – and most of it will go to people who are already very rich.
Fifth, there’s the transition of what the historian Gary Gerstle calls “political orders”. A political order is not defined by the political party that happens to be in power. It’s the dominant ideological framework within which all parties that aspire to power have to operate. From 1945 to 1980, the political order of the West was broadly Keynesian and social democratic. From 1980 to 2008, it was broadly neoliberal – until it imploded in the great banking crash. There has not, however, been a successful transition to a refashioned social democracy.
The consequences for democratic politics are, again, twofold. First, the strength of the social democratic and neoliberal orders was manifest in the way their opponents had to accept them. Conservatives accommodated themselves to social democracy until the late 1970s. Then progressives did the same with neoliberalism. This meant that there was such a thing as a common ground, an underlying consensus between the big mainstream parties.
That’s gone now – there is no political order that has the power to compel the assent of most governing parties. And the other consequence is that electorates have been withdrawing their consent from the neoliberal faith in globalisation while they are not being offered clear alternatives. They seek refuge in an economic nationalism that has shallow roots in contemporary capitalism.
The sixth incomplete shift is the religious transition. Again, it is epoch-making – for most of human existence, worship of the divine has been one of the primary organising principles of society. But in the US, for example, while 42 per cent of people went to church weekly at the turn of the century, that number is now down to just 30 per cent. Conversely, the proportion of people who have no religion has more than doubled in the same period.
What does this mean for democratic politics? As religious groups shrink in size, they become more conservative and more militant. They are left with the most orthodox believers and they also feel that they have to, as they see it, stop the rot by imposing their articles of faith on society as a whole before it is too late.
These incomplete transitions are not happening in isolation from each other. They interact. The climate crisis that necessitates the carbon transition drives migration. The explosion of virtual technologies splinters the kind of consensus that could generate a common political order to replace neoliberalism. And so on.
The far right has been much better than the left at giving voters the illusion that it has an accurate map of the no man’s land that stretches across all these liminal spaces. It erects a signpost that says “Back this way” – back to burning carbon, back to economic nationalism, back to the patriarchal family, back to whiteness, back to faith and devotion.
Its problem is that history doesn’t work like that. Even if all of these returns were desirable, they are not possible. While we wait for that truth to reveal itself, we will be living in a long Halloween.