[Fresh Ink] The Political Ecology of Collapse (Part 3)

[Richard Menec]

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/12/political-ecology-of-collapse-part.html

The Political Ecology of Collapse

Part Three: The Bomb at the Heart of the System

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 23 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

The outcome of the Copenhagen climate change talks last week could not have 
been better suited to illustrate the points I have been trying to make in 
the last two posts. After all the high hopes and overheated rhetoric, as I 
(and of course a great many other people) predicted some time ago, what 
remains in place as the dust settles is business as usual.

The United States and China, who head the main power blocs in the 
negotiations and also generate more carbon dioxide than anyone else, minted 
a toothless accord that furthers nobody's interests but theirs, and 
proceeded to tell the rest of the world to like it or lump it. A few climate 
activists are still gamely trying to find grounds for hope in the accord; 
others are shrilly accusing Barack Obama of betraying the messianic 
expectations they projected onto him; and a certain amount of stunned 
silence, in response to the failure of climate activism to have the 
slightest effect on the proceedings, is also being heard.

It's probably worth pointing out that the results would not have differed 
noticeably if John McCain had won last November's election. The consensus 
that has been fixed in place since Ronald Reagan's first term, in other 
words, still dominates American politics. Despite increasingly desperate 
efforts on the part of both mainstream parties to appeal to an increasingly 
disaffected electorate via increasingly overheated rhetoric, it takes a 
micrometer to measure concrete differences in policy between the parties. 
Each party has its captive constituencies, to which it makes appropriate 
noises come election time; Republicans claim they want to ban abortion, 
Democrats claim they want to protect the environment, but neither party ever 
gets around to turning any of this talk into action.

The most popular explanation for all this relies on the sheer hypocrisy of 
politicians, and such a case is not too hard to make, not least because it's 
rare for politicians to be any more ethical than the people they represent. 
Some versions of the case insist that politicians are cynical beasts who are 
in it purely for the money, and find shilling for various corrupt interests 
more lucrative than serving the public. Other versions, in the ascendant 
these days, insist that politicians are puppets of some sinister elite 
pursuing a totalitarian agenda, and then try to find reasons why every turn 
of events furthers that agenda.

Now of course it's tolerably easy to find examples that can be used to 
support these claims. Some politicians are blatantly corrupt and 
self-serving; others just as blatantly put the interests of their allies in 
the business world ahead of the people they are supposed to serve. It 
furthers many political narratives to portray the situation as an episode of 
Dudley Do-Right, with some wicked elite or other in the role of Snidely 
Whiplash, tying the American people to the train tracks, as Dudley Do-Right 
scoops up an armload of protest signs and position papers and gallops off to 
the rescue. Still, I'm by no means certain this is really all there is to 
the matter.

The counterexample that comes to mind is Afghanistan, and specifically 
Obama's decision to send another 30,000 troops (and an undisclosed number of 
"civilian contractors", the modern military version of disposable temp 
labor) into that quagmire. To call this decision self-defeating is to 
understate matters considerably. Afghanistan is where empires go to die; the 
debacle of the Russian occupation a few years back was only the latest in a 
long and unbroken history of failed attempts to conquer Afghanistan. Not 
even Alexander the Great managed the trick, and whatever the personal 
qualities of the airbrushed machine politician in the Oval Office and the 
camo-clad bureaucrat who manages his war might be, I confess to a reasonable 
doubt that anybody in the future will call them Obama or McChrystal the 
Greater.

Leave aside moral issues for a moment, and it's tolerably clear that only 
two strategies could prevent total US failure in Afghanistan. The first is 
to reinstate the draft, conscript half a million new soldiers, shift the US 
economy over to a wartime footing, and go into Afghanistan with the same 
overwhelming force the Chinese deployed successfully on similar terrain in 
Tibet. The other is to declare a victory and get out. Any other choice means 
the United States will keep on spending money it doesn't have and prestige 
it can't spare on a war it isn't going to win.

I doubt that any of this is invisible to the experienced military planners 
in the Pentagon, or the politicians who give them their marching orders. 
Why, then, the futile gesture?

The hard fact of the matter is that neither of the two potentially 
successful strategies is politically possible to an American government 
today. Exemption from forced military service was part of the price the 
American middle class exacted in exchange for their abandonment of the 
radicalism of the 1960s, and no politician is willing to risk the backlash 
that would follow an attempt to tamper with that bargain. Furthermore, it's 
by no means certain that America has the economic strength left to fight a 
real war at this point, and it's not hard to name hostile powers who would 
be happy to use any such opportunity to push us over the edge into national 
bankruptcy.

Declaring a victory and getting out is a good deal more viable, and it's the 
option that Obama's successor in 2013 will likely be forced to embrace. 
Accepting it now, though, would offend many constituencies, not all of which 
have financial motives for supporting the war, and it would require America 
to give up on intervening in the Great Game of geopolitics now being played 
in central Asia - a goal many factions in the American political class are 
unready to abandon.

Behind the decision to send an inadequate force to prop up a losing 
struggle, in other words, lies the complex nature of political power in 
contemporary America. A great many people nowadays seem to think that 
because they don't have the power to impose their agendas on the country, 
someone else must have that power, and the increasingly self-defeating 
decisions coming out of Washington must result from deliberate policy on the 
part of that someone else. Comforting as that belief may be, the facts don't 
support it. A century of political reforms have diffused power so broadly in 
American society that no one group has a monopoly on power, and any group of 
would-be leaders has to build alliances and garner support among a great 
many independent centers of power with agendas of their own.

Now of course it's quite true, as the left is fond of pointing out, that a 
great many of these power centers are interested primarily in pursuing their 
own interests, and are perfectly willing to do it at the expense of the 
common good. It's also true that this indictment can be applied to the left 
as much as to the right. Still, behind the inevitable chicanery found across 
the political spectrum lies the insoluble dilemma in which the American 
political system has been caught since the 1970s - the inevitable failure of 
government by pork barrel in an age of decline.

Like most of the nations that call themselves representative democracies 
these days, America operates by means of a system not too different from the 
one that graced, if that's the right word, the twilight years of the Roman 
Republic. The ultimate mandate for power comes from popular vote, and so 
every possible means is used to make sure elections come out as desired. 
Vote fraud is one such means; propaganda is another; but the most effective 
is to buy the loyalty of voting blocs with cold hard cash. From defense 
spending to entitlements to economic stimulus programs, that's the name of 
the game, and it pays off handsomely come election time.

There are, however, at least two massive problems with this sort of pork-fed 
politics. First, the number of groups to be placated tends to rise as the 
size of the pork barrel increases. In today's America, any group that can 
organize and raise money effectively enough to influence elections can 
usually elbow its way to a place at the feeding trough. (That today's 
radicals of left and right alike are, by and large, inept at organizing and 
fundraising goes a long way to explain their insistence that power is being 
kept out of their hands by a malevolent elite.) It's not hard to respond to 
a changing world when the interests that have to sign on to policy changes 
are few and clearly defined, as they were fifty years ago, but it becomes 
much harder when power is diffused through scores of competing factions, and 
it takes an alliance of a dozen disparate interest groups to get anything 
done at all.

This happens in the life of nearly all republics, and it plays an important 
role in the political breakdowns that afflict them at regular intervals. 
Still, another factor will be familiar to regular readers of this blog: the 
mismatch between growth and the limits of the environment that provides the 
basis for growth. In societies that use resources at a steady rate, those 
limits are always close at hand, and struggles between interest groups over 
the distribution of pork are recognized as zero-sum games, in which somebody 
has to lose for somebody else to gain; thus the multiplication of factions 
tends to be limited by the fixed size of the feeding trough.

In a society that relies on rapidly expanding production of resources, on 
the other hand, this can be evaded for a time. The first two-thirds of the 
20th century thus saw an explosion of factions that spanned the entire upper 
half of the American class structure, from the ultrarich to unionized labor. 
The result was a vast number of people who all expected to get financial 
benefits from the government. Yet the end of America's real economic 
expansion in the 1970s meant that these demands had to be paid out of a 
dwindling supply of real wealth.

One result has been a drastic narrowing of the options available to 
politicians. A great many simple and necessary reforms that could be enacted 
without harm to anyone - for example, putting a means test on social 
security pensions - are completely off the table, because nobody can put 
together a governing coalition without the support of groups that oppose 
such measures. Equally, a great many ghastly policies - for example, 
deliberately inflating financial bubbles - have become political 
necessities, because they allow governments to get away with the pretense of 
paying off their supporters. Meanwhile any sector of society not organized 
enough to defend its interests can basically count on being thrown to the 
wolves.

The rising spiral of crises that threaten the survival of industrial society 
might be expected to trump such matters. The problem here, of course, is 
that prophecies of imminent doomsday have been standard political theater in 
American public life for more than a century, and most people in politics 
have long since stopped listening to them. There are plenty of people in 
politics who still remember, for example, the widespread insistence that the 
energy crisis of the 1970s was supposed to be permanent; the fact that there 
were plenty of less shrill predictions that have proven to be much more 
accurate in retrospect is nothing like as memorable.

Behind all of this lies the central political fact of the limits to growth: 
the reduction of First World nations to a Third World lifestyle that will be 
the inevitable result of any transition to a postpetroleum world, whether 
that transition is deliberate or unplanned. Metaphors about elephants in 
living rooms don't begin to touch the political explosiveness of this fact, 
or the degree to which people at every point on the political spectrum have 
tried to pretend that it just isn't so. Still, set aside delusions about 
miraculous new energy sources that show up basically because we want them 
to, and it's impossible to evade.

Let's walk through the logic. The most reasonable estimates suggest that, 
given a crash program and the best foreseeable technologies, renewable 
sources can probably provide the United States with around fifteen percent 
of the energy it currently gets from fossil fuels. Since every good and 
service in the economy is the product of energy, it's a very rough but 
functional approximation to say that in a green economy, every American will 
have to get by on the equivalent of fifteen percent of his or her current 
income. Take a moment to work through the consequences in your own life; if 
you made $50,000 in 2009, for example, imagine having to live on $7,500 in 
2010. That's quite a respectable income by Third World standards, but it 
won't support the kind of lifestyle that the vast majority of Americans, 
across the political spectrum, believe is theirs by right.

That's the bomb ticking away at the heart of America's political system. 
When it goes off, the entire system of government by pork barrel will 
explode messily, and it's only in the fantasies of reformers that what 
replaces it will likely be an improvement. (My guess? Anything from a 
military coup followed, after various convulsions, by a new and less 
centralized constitution, to civil war and the partition of the United 
States into half a dozen impoverished and quarreling nations.) In the 
meantime, we can expect to see every possible short term expedient put to 
use in an attempt to stave off the explosion even for a little while, and 
any measure that might risk rocking the boat enough to set off the bomb will 
be quietly roundfiled by all parties.

A meaningful political response to the growing instability of global climate 
is one such measure, and a meaningful political response to peak oil is 
another. No such project can be enacted without redirecting a great deal of 
money and resources away from current expenditures toward the construction 
of new infrastructure. The proponents of such measures are quick to insist 
that this means new jobs will be created, and of course this is true, but 
they neglect to mention that a great many more existing jobs will go away, 
and the interests that presently lay claim to the money and resources 
involved are not exactly eager to relinquish those. A political system of 
centralized power could overcome their resistance readily enough, but a 
system in which power is diffused and fragmented cannot do so. That the 
collapse of the entire system is a likely long-term consequence of this 
inability is simply one of the common ironies of history.

_____

John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in 
America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for 
more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including 
The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to 
the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, 
Maryland. ?

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