Global Sedition

In these days of Tea Party Rallies and Occupy Wall Street demonstrations at home, of the Arab Spring, and various flavor of Jihadism around the world, it is amazing to realize that Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) could ever have been taken seriously.   It is important though to recall that that Fukuyama's thesis which was that all of the political and philosophical issues about which human kind could fight seem to have been resolved in favor of Western democratic pluralism and free markets.  From that era we have the1998 film version of the classic series "Lost in Space," in which the bad guys were a movement laboring under the name the "Global Sedition." 

It is the very vagueness of this global sedition that makes them interesting.  Other than an objection to hyperbolic acting, cough sorry William, they did not seem to have any particular program.  At that time the great binary ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the West had been won.  Free markets were clearly superior to the collapsed command economies.  In the words of Christopher Hitchens, socialism was no longer an acceptable critique of global free market system, that in fact there was no critique of the global economic system.  In two days it will be 2012, the year 1998 will lie 14 years in the past and there is still no acceptable critique of the global economic system.

Why?

Why after over two decades since the fall of the Berlin wall have the western intelligencia not arrived at new critical view of our economic system?  Is it really within the realm of possibilities that the regulated free market is the best of all possible worlds?  We have come to expect that cell phones, computers, power grids, medical access, … will all improve with in a year or two and be totally transformed on the timescale of decades.  Why do we not expect a transformation the way in which we provide for ourselves with our various needs?  

That this critique does not yet exist is not an expression of satisfaction with the status quo.  The Occupy and to a lesser extent its predecessor the Tea Party movement come from opposite sides of the political spectrum, but both arose from insurgencies within their political cultures.  Dissatisfaction is what unites both movements.  The tea party movement suffers from cooption by the opportunistic and the clownish.  The name of the Tea Party now carries currency within the halls of the US Congress and one fears for the virtue of that damsel.   The disavowal of individual leaders leads me to be more hopeful for the future of the Occupy movement.  There may even be an advantage to the absence of an endorsed specific list of demands.  With no leaders, with no specific demands to which one can feign respect and pay lip service it is difficult to coopted the movement.  They remain free to demand leadership on the only true issue critique which is that the system is simply not fair.

posted by Y.H.N.