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Daniel Bessner and Ajay Singh Chaudhary join Protean View to help us understand the fascism debate in America and beyond.

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Readings

Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (discount code BESSNER26)

This is America

Does American Fascism Exist?

The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World

Neofascism After Trump

The Supermanagerial Reich

We live in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable world.1 Central to our way of life is the socio-economic system in which we find ourselves, increasingly referred to as “late capitalism.” It was first described in 1975 by the late Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel as “a new epoch marked by expansion and acceleration in production and exchange.”2 Fifty years on, we are experiencing the effects of Mandel’s conclusion that wealth inequality, overconsumption, corporate dominance, financialization, and endless commodification are magnifying the unsustainable costs for human and non-human life alike.

Rather than weigh in on the causes or cures for this expanding order, I intend to give a personal snapshot of a period in my life that helped me make sense of our situation. My story begins in Britain in the 1990s and ends in the Czech Republic in the 2020s. My aim is to ask how the Czech experience of transitioning from totalitarian communism to free-market capitalism can inform us about our current trajectory. After having lived in the country’s capital Prague for nearly twenty years, I hope my experiences and takeaways can provide a useful perspective.3

I was born in London in 1984 but grew up in a small town south of Manchester through the 1990s until I left the United Kingdom in 2006. It was a comfortable suburban middle-class upbringing; safe, white, conservative, and, though only a twenty-minute train ride from downtown Manchester, largely isolated from urban Britain and those less fortunate.

It was the era of Tony Blair’s New Labour, coming in the wake of Conservative leadership and the Thatcherite privatization and deregulation of the 1980s. Leftist policies that had been the cornerstone of post-war Britain were now to be hollowed out for the sake of financialization and vast economic growth. Arguably, the dismal state of Britain in the 1970s helped rationalize this increasing economic liberalism. But over time, it felt as if Britain was pivoting towards the United States, where commercialization, commodification, and consolidation had become the new norms. And as costs rose, the culture changed. The death of the pub and the decline of the high street were visible symptoms of what I had come to believe was a larger problem—that capitalism kills culture, and culture sustains community.4

Like most adolescent millennials (or, as we were known at the time, Gen Y) growing up in the United Kingdom, I was raised on a diet of British and American music and film that taught me the virtues of progressive individualism, personal enlightenment, and—like most youth culture—rejectionism. Hip hop, grunge, and rave music all spoke to me in a relatable language that advocated for peripheral adherence and mainstream rejection. Meanwhile, films like Falling Down (1993), Fight Club (1999), and The Matrix (1999) tapped into what I saw as a sense of collective frustration about the encroachment of corporatization in society.

Having grown accustomed to being reminded that my generation would be the first to expect less financial security than their parents (unless you aimed for a career in finance, banking, or the IT sector), the demands of British work-life seemed antithetical to the future I wanted. I decided, therefore, to pursue a degree at Loughborough University’s Marxist-leaning politics department, where classes such as “Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Globalization” provided me a crash-course in Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, the 1994 Zapatista Uprising,5 and the 1999 Seattle riots or “Battle of Seattle.”6

As a graduate of this latest iteration of the global anti-capitalist movement, I decided to leave the United Kingdom for the Central European country of the Czech Republic, where a combination of intriguing socio-political realities made it an appealing choice.

Prague in the mid-2000s was a place where cost of living met quality of life in ways one may expect from a post-communist state. Though it never experienced the same intensity of communist-totalitarianism as in the Soviet Union,7 Czechoslovakia’s brand of Soviet-style Marxist-Leninism (from 1948 to 1989) had numerous reverberations on Czech society. Encouragingly, I discovered the Czechs had retained free education (until twenty-six years old), universal healthcare, and a distinct lack of consumerism. Not immediately noticeable, however, was the extensive scarring caused by the regime, including: endemic governmental corruption, public suspicion of the state, a large shadow-economy, and a lack of trust between citizens.8 The last point I found particularly unnerving. To cite a popular Czech saying of the time on systemic governmental corruption, “the fish rots from the head.”

The Czech priority, therefore, was to progressively remedy the ills of the past with democratic political institutions, a market economy, the rule of law, and the growth of a civil society.9 Though the Pražák (Praguers) were proud of their historic urban center with its gothic and baroque architecture, they were tired of living in a poorly run museum. Modernity promised them a chance to feel a sense of normalcy.

For Western leftists like myself, we felt as though we had traveled through time, back to when the world was less complicated, less demanding, and much freer. Prague was a dirty, beautiful city, buzzing with culture and cosmopolitanism. Something new always seemed to be happening and the affordability of the city only made it more accessible. Rent was low (around £200-300), food was cheap, and beer (the national export) was even cheaper. In 2005, one Pound Sterling bought 43 Czech Koruna, and one beer cost around 17 Koruna. Working as an English teacher provided me an above average salary. And within a short space of time, I had found a community of like-minded seekers.

Unsurprisingly, some Czechs viewed us much like the American GIs in Europe in World War II: overpaid, oversexed, over here. Yet most seemed to like us, never fully comprehending why we had chosen to make their small republic our home. “Why are you here?” was a common question in those early days. “Why not London? Why not New York?” they would ask, fondly sharing stories of their time in the United Kingdom in the 1990s when they studied English working as an au pair. “I guess I love how free it is here,” I would respond. They struggled to understand. We each wanted what the other had; mutually exoticizing the other’s world prevented us from seeing each other clearly. Though there was nothing inherently different about the Czechs from the British, the contrast came from the influences of our respective socio-economic histories.

Time spent outside of Prague typically revealed a slower pace of life, with close communities and active traditions. Many still grew their own fruits and vegetables or had a variety of poultry in the backyard. Pickling or preserving their harvest for the winter season was common. And come fall, the whole nation would engage in the delicate art of mushroom picking—I would often receive a large jar of dried fungi from a Czech friend insisting they would provide numerous culinary possibilities. Early Friday afternoons would see a mass exodus of the population as they travelled to visit their parents and grandparents in other towns. Or, perhaps, to take a trip to the family chata (country cottage)—a place previously used to escape the regime—where songs around the fire and shots of homemade slivovice (Czech schnaps) would last long into the night.

The urban-rural rift I was used to in the United Kingdom was less obvious here; instead a greater continuity between both worlds existed. I attributed this to the influence of the regime. The arrival of communist rule in 1948 had stalled the post-war modernization of the 1950s and 1960s seen in Western societies. While fifty years of centralized state-rule had stifled economic growth and development, it inadvertently enabled the Czechs to keep stronger ties to traditional culture, something I felt was lost in Britain.10

Though I admired the Czech way of life, as a foreigner, the closest connections I was able to build were with my expat community (or bubble). In hindsight, our bohemian lifestyles were sustained not by our own convictions but by the unstable nature of the transition period, coupled with the unimposing attitude of the Czechs. We encountered few obstacles and often remained ignorant of the difficulties the locals faced. I soon realized there was something contradictory about a bunch of Western idealists (with financial backing) using a post-communist state for their anti-capitalist fantasies.

The irony was not lost on me that I had fled the capitalist West only to find myself in a country that was keen to emulate it. As we taught English to sustain our alternative lifestyles, the Czechs were learning a language that would give them access to the global economy. Fifty years of communism had left them tired and deeply cynical of leftist politics, and they rolled their eyes at people like me who arrogantly attempted to convince them otherwise. I soon learned there was a huge difference between “armchair socialism” and the reality of living under totalitarian communism. Arguing, as we often did, over the extent to which Soviet communism had been true to Marx was not the point; to most Czechs it was a failed experiment never worth repeating.11

In essence, Czechs wanted the same thing everybody else wanted: clean lines and modern living. And in time, subtle changes in consumptive habits shifted them away from the frugality I once found so admirable. But who was I to discourage them from the promise and affordability of an IKEA-lifestyle? My own apartment was filled with Swedish-flatpack!

It was almost preordained that Prague’s gradual gentrification would coincide with my own maturation of tastes and lifestyle. Where once we ate at menza (very cheap canteens), went on shoe-string road-trips, and clubbed in underground medieval cellars, we now sip overpriced wine and flat-whites, stare at laptops, and regurgitate the daily news cycle. The pendulum of post-communist modernity has swung further than expected, creating an unusually polished result. On recent trips to Vienna and Brussels, I was surprised to find a scruffiness and political antagonism that is largely vacant in the Czech capital these days. Prague continues to have a good amount of alternative vibrancy for the twenty-somethings, but the past energies of transitory turbulence are long gone.

Prague has come a long way from the days of my first encounter. The impact of foreign money and multi-billion Euro investments has become hard to miss, with cost of living and real estate prices skyrocketing beyond affordability. Though this is a worldwide problem, it has been felt more acutely in post-communist Europe as salaries remain comparably low to their Western neighbors. Post-COVID-19 inflation, increasing energy costs caused by the Russo-Ukrainian war, and falling real wages have also taken their toll. Meanwhile, economic wealth disparity between Prague and less affluent regions has also worsened. Despite this, post-communist living standards have doubled since 1989, and a boom in entrepreneurship has transformed the business landscape.

The Czechs have arrived late to free market thinking. But to give them credit, they are yet to contract many of the most irritating syndromes suffered by its Western adherents, namely: rat race competitiveness, an addiction to data-driven decision-making, a multitude of mental health issues, and ordering things that are not on the menu! My Czech colleagues assure me the financialization and corporate dominance of the West is a long way off. The aforementioned “simple life” has changed little since 2006, with many young Czechs concluding that mass consumerism and career living is not necessarily the way to go. If the Czechs have taught me anything, it is moderation. Extremes will always exclude and bring out the worst in us. If they can secure the gains they have made without losing sight of what makes their culture unique, there may still be hope for this seasoned Central European nation.

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Thomas Pierret joins Protean View to discuss the new Syrian state, the future of Islamism, and more.

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Melani McAlister joins Protean View to discuss the history of the Christian Right in the United States, its recent split on the question of Israel, the future of U.S.-Israel relations, and the evangelical discourse on Christian persecution by Muslims.

If you enjoyed this episode and want more from Protean View, please subscribe to our newsletter and become a paid supporter. You can also support us on ⁠Patreon⁠.

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In early 2024, my wife and I joined the Columbia University protests against the genocide in Gaza. Around that time, I was in the process of finalizing my doctoral dissertation on Egyptian education and came to realize a connection between my work and the events taking place on campus. A peculiar moment during Passover prompted this realization—specifically, when a Jewish prayer circle formed and began praying for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” I wondered what drove them to stand up for Palestinians in this way and why, from their privileged standpoints, they would risk being shamed, doxed, or shunned.

I have long grappled with the question of what conditions or relational dynamics enable someone in a position of power to confront their privilege and become willing to relinquish aspects of it. However, in the context of my own research on Egypt, it was not primarily from a religious or ethnic perspective, but a class-based one. I tried to explore how privileged higher-class students who benefit from capitalist structural inequalities can be taught to genuinely empathize with, and act in the interests of, the exploited.

In the case of Egypt, fostering constructive inter-class solidarity can be achieved by encouraging students and teachers in international school classrooms to recognize the neoliberal and neocolonial forces that shape them. To my surprise, entering the field with a secular framework that assumed a clean separation between class and religion was quickly challenged. I found that this work not only required a critical examination of the inner structure of the international school itself but also revealed how deeply religious conceptualizations of class shape students’ understandings of social hierarchy and their place within it.

The Reality of International Schools in Egypt

While scholars debate when Egyptian public schooling began to decline, there is broad consensus that its deterioration has driven more affluent families toward private international schools over the past fifty years. Tristan Bunnell defines international schools as institutions “with a global outlook located mainly outside an English-speaking country delivering a non-national curriculum at least partly in English.”1 In Egypt, these schools offer British, American, French, German, and other curricula with annual fees ranging from $2,000 to $20,000. Often established as business ventures, they cater to the rising demands of the affluent by offering both social distinction and academic quality. Naturally, higher costs entail more elaborate selling points: Western teachers, luxurious amenities, swimming pools, sporting facilities, and high-tech classrooms.

Having attended, worked at, and studied at these schools myself, I have found that families don’t just enroll their children there in pursuit of academic quality, but to assimilate them into certain ways of being and knowing. This is evident through their curricula, which privilege Euro-American histories and effectively silence local ones. Students do not learn about Egypt’s involvement in the First and Second World Wars or the experiences of Jews in the Arab world, for example, but rather study the history of Europe’s Holocaust. This privileging of all things Euro-American manifests in the schools’ administrative structures as well. In particular, foreign teachers—seen as superior by parents who often conflate “Western” and “quality” education—are generally better compensated than their local counterparts.2 Paid in foreign currencies, foreign teacher-hires raise international schools’ administrative costs, which in turn gives them license to raise tuition. Perhaps more importantly, these schools fuel palpable class distinctions since they are often located in Cairo’s affluent, isolated outskirts. Students thus experience physical insulation alongside intellectual alienation.

But insulation and alienation are small prices to pay for parents, who are chiefly motivated by a desire to provide their children with access to international universities and the global economy. Shuning Liu terms this process the formation of the neoliberal subject, where class reproduction becomes vital for local and, critically, international mobility.3 In other words, parents are strategizing to ensure their children have a place among the global elite. Yet the position these students and their parents find themselves in, as “elites” in a country like Egypt, represents a paradox. Because international schools isolate students from their local contexts and interests while strengthening ties to Western ideals and global futures,4 they effectively produce a Fanonian postcolonial “national bourgeoisie.” By mediating the colonized-colonizer relationship, international schools translate Egyptian students’ local realities into languages and concepts palatable to their former colonizers.5 The students then become the “transmission line” between their nation and a “camouflaged” neocolonial capitalism.6

Considering the above, how can we cultivate inter-class solidarity in an international schooling system that propagates class differences within Global South communities? Is complete renunciation of privilege an ideologically reasonable and practical way to achieve genuine solidarity? The philosophy of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire can assist us here.7 Writing on the liberation of the mind, Freire focused primarily on the oppressed, emphasizing that “oppressors cannot be liberators” because only the oppressed are best placed to understand the significance of an oppressive society.8 Yet he also offered a path toward solidarity for oppressors, clearly distinguishing between “liberating someone” and “struggling with them for liberation” by “entering the situation of those with whom one is in solidarity.”9

In Freirian terms, “true solidarity” demands that affluent Egyptian students fully relinquish their status and privilege to join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation. However, their youth and limited societal power make such a sacrifice unrealistic, and it is furthermore difficult to ignore the pragmatic constraints of fully relinquishing one’s privilege. Still, I believe that, at the very least, meaningful exposure to the lived realities of those they may unintentionally oppress is essential. I wondered: Could this goal be achieved through changes to the curriculum?

Problematizing the International School

Previously, I had the opportunity to collaborate in developing a curriculum for the children of privileged elites at two Cairene international schools. The goal was to create a learning experience where high school students could reflect on their social positions in order to explore avenues of inter-class solidarity. Students investigated their own schools and contemplated not only their social standing, but also the broader status of Egyptian education.

The students offered raw insights into embedded ideologies that adults typically hide. Most began with blame. Unlike Freire’s oppressed, however, their blame was not self-directed but rather directed at the oppressed majority. This was a blame rooted in misplaced narratives of merit, in which the majority “did not work hard enough” to deserve these students’ schooling rights—something they believed they earned through their parents’ hard work. Moreover, when asked how they would engage with poverty, most of these young people felt that charity was enough to counter inequalities. This perspective was heavily influenced by their upbringing and even carried certain “religious” connotations. This reliance on charity as a response to inequality is tied to what Freire calls false generosity—acts that appear generous but in fact sustain uneven power dynamics by maintaining the dependency of the oppressed on those who hold power. By contrast, Freire argues, “true generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.”10

Despite their shortsightedness, the students also proved to be relatively malleable. Conducting structured interviews with working-class laborers like matrons and drivers on school grounds helped humanize them and allowed them to view everyday realities (which they would otherwise pass over) in a new light. Similarly, simulating variant household incomes helped them foster a rare understanding of decision-making under a more restricted budget. Accordingly, their notions of blame and charity began to shift. As they asked questions about their schools, they became more conscious of inequalities and moved toward a more empathetic understanding of the other. Many ended up acknowledging that much of their good fortune was not exclusively the result of their parents’ efforts—they began to recognize luck as a factor.

While the students did not fully appreciate the structural dynamics at play in their lives, these shifts in perception significantly influenced how they began to propose responses to poverty. When explaining how they would engage with class injustice, their answers revealed a more nuanced and deliberate form of action in pursuit of solutions, taking account of their abilities, privileges, and the problems at hand. Rather than simply throwing money at people to fulfill basic needs—as nearly all had initially suggested—students began to explore more targeted interventions in education. Some proposed buying internet subscriptions, while others suggested laptops. One student even expressed a willingness to personally teach someone English. These proposed actions did not call for macro-structural change through collective organizing, but they nonetheless reflected a subtle shift toward engaging with systemic issues. Still, they remained constrained within a neoliberal imaginary, incapable of envisioning alternatives beyond what already exists.

Notwithstanding the genuineness and intentionality behind their proposed actions, a sense of superiority persisted among the students. They not only felt entitled to decide what others’ needs were but also held an unquestioned distrust toward the people they sought to help. Despite showing some structural understanding of education’s role in social mobility, many assumed that the poor would still rely on begging if simply “handed” money. In other words, they presumed that poor individuals would not invest in their own education and thus could not be trusted to make sound financial decisions. This aligns with what Susan Benigni Cipolle describes as the ethics-of-charity mindset—an approach motivated by deficit thinking in which “doing for” the poor replaces their ability to do for themselves.11 These paternalistic attitudes, even among the youngest members of the privileged classes, remain a true obstacle to solidarity. Unless we begin from a standpoint of equality, any form of structural awareness risks becoming nothing more than a performative exercise.

Religion: The Missing Link?

Another significant challenge posed by Egyptian international schools is that they operate within a secular framework that enforces a dichotomous division between the social sciences and religious worldviews, despite the unwavering presence of the latter in students’ lives.

I noticed a huge discrepancy between what students said in our interviews and what they said in class during implementation. Many students—both Muslim and Christian—referenced religion when explaining poverty, with some even claiming that God had created social classes for a reason (and thus poverty was inescapable). For others, charity was mainly driven by religious notions such as zakat and sadaqa. Deeper dives revealed that students viewed wealth as a responsibility and a debt—not a privilege—to be repaid via charity. Interestingly, their sense of agency in resisting unfair structures was diminished by seeing God as an overwhelming force controlling their reality. Consequently, the students did not distinguish between profit and profiteering,12 where the latter is forbidden as exploitation, and in this regard their views demonstrated how religion and neoliberalism can quickly become enmeshed. Mona Atia defines this as “pious neoliberalism,” a phenomenon that blurs the lines between faith, economy, and governance.13

Despite their strong religious commitments, however, students and teachers agreed that religion’s place should be restricted to religious classes alone. Everyone seemed to agree that religion cannot be considered a “real” source of knowledge. How then can we truly foster solidarity with the other if we cannot even integrate epistemological splits within the self? How can we counter the negative view of the other that informs our actions if we cannot create learning experiences that interrogate our own beliefs?

Jack Mezirow, the godfather of Transformative Learning Theory, argues that any radical shift in one’s worldview is driven by a “disorienting dilemma.”14 This disorienting dilemma is usually an event that forces one to re-evaluate their beliefs. In the case of many young Jewish people today, the Gaza genocide might have been their disorienting dilemma, placing them on the path of becoming anti-war, anti-apartheid, and even anti-Zionist. But what do we do when the conditions for a disorienting dilemma are not present? What do we do in the case of young people—specifically, in Egypt—who are destined for positions of power and belong to an educational setting that fully isolates them from the realities outside of it?

The curriculum experiment I led attempted to trigger such reassessments, though it did not amount to a disorienting dilemma for the students since it only engaged them intellectually and cognitively, not experientially. Our instinct as educators is to protect our students from experiencing real discomfort because they are young. Yet, as the educational scholar Michael Zembylas says, without accepting the value of discomfort, teaching and learning miss important productive openings for transformation.15 Both teachers and students need opportunities to experience discomfort, without which cultivating true solidarity remains unviable.16

Our hope lies in problematizing the international school itself and making it a site of productive discomfort. It ought to be a place where students learn how such schools preserve the advantages of the elite while limiting others’ ability to access them; where patterns of exploitation are examined, whether in the roles of matrons, drivers, or teachers; and where the school’s profit-oriented philosophy is critically questioned for the part it plays in reproducing social class divisions. As Sean Fitzsimmons notes, many students in international schools are intellectually colonized because they “do not question the school’s use of ‘international’ terminology and instead believe that the Anglo-Western perspective promoted by the school is the globally accepted perspective.”17

The question then becomes, which schools would welcome such critical inquiries into their practices? And, if they do, how will they navigate and value the discomfort created by these inquiries? More importantly, would the same parents who yearn for their kids to integrate into the global establishment accept them? Would a critical inquiry of this sort be seen as anything other than undermining?

Creating inter-class solidarity is not just about accepting and normalizing discomfort as a pedagogical tool. It is also about allowing “non-objective” worldviews, like religion, to enter the conversation in order to challenge master narratives on inequality. Simply put, the false distinction between the religious and the secular must be challenged. By abandoning a paradigm that isolates religion as an exclusively private matter, we accept religion as an embodied, lived practice. This in turn will allow sharper debates around poverty, exploitation, and structural inequality to surface from Egyptian teachers and students alike.

The Jewish prayer circle with which I started this essay represents a moment of reconciliation between religious belief and political ideology. It was a moment of reclaiming religion and declaring: “this is mine, this is what it is for.” Similarly, international school classrooms can carve out room to critically engage with salient religious interpretations of socioeconomic class that tend to legitimize and re-produce capitalistic ways of seeing the world. By tying these to religious histories and social thought, we can challenge neoliberal views that obstruct solidarity. The idea that religion only belongs in “religion class” can be confronted by contesting the monopoly over who gets to speak about religion, broadening the range of perspectives students are exposed to, and ultimately challenging prevailing narratives that have normalized capitalism in religious thought.

The social reformer and intellectual Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) was an unconventional evangelist for his religious tradition. In 1897, Abduh remembered giving a lecture in Beirut in the 1880s, where he said: “Islam removed all racial distinctions and affirmed the dignity of all in connection to God in their creation,” adding that all of humanity shared in “the dignity of attaining the highest achievements that God set out.” By “achievements,” Abduh meant knowledge, and the context of his remarks was a school known for its controversial aspiration to educate children of all backgrounds together. Though Abduh’s remarks about mixed schooling are particular to his own time and context, the confrontation between the idealism of diversity and its opposition is familiar to ours.

Abduh was a leader of a cosmopolitan progressive reformist movement that aimed to reject prejudice and chauvinism to realize a new human community united through a love of knowledge. His late-nineteenth century vision is an early example of the progressive ecumenical humanism that has become the ideology widely shared by the educated classes around the world today. It is this ideology that now seems so threatened by an equally-global trend of national populism. Scholars and observers have analyzed “educational polarization” in terms of factors that are specific to the Global North in the twenty-first century, but here I argue that educational reform and the love of a very narrow form of diversity are linked at a historically deeper level. Like Abduh in the nineteenth century, liberals today have not considered how their broad ideals of diversity and inclusion depend on the much narrower range of experiences they possess as members of the educated classes. Simply put, the diversity with which educated professionals are most comfortable is the diversity of people who have shared this same experience.

Education and Belonging

Pundits, political scientists, and casual observers have commented extensively on educational polarization in Euro-American politics. Most important here is the trend of left-liberal political parties increasingly relying on the votes of educated professionals as much of their traditional working-class base has embraced the right and far-right. Thomas Piketty among others illustrate that though this trend is pronounced, it is not as simple as the left going upscale and the right representing the downtrodden uniformly. It is rather that parties like the Democrats and Republicans have become idiosyncratic cross-class coalitions organized around cultural issues. Though every country’s culture wars are different, voters across the Global North have grown more opposed to immigration from poorer countries as educated professionals have embraced diversity as a core value.

This preference among educated liberals has significantly shifted politics as a whole. Beginning in the 2010s, long-term intramural academic debates about the humanities canon and the social bases of prejudice spilled over from college campuses to major metropolitan media in the United States. The New York Times and Atlantic were debating the definitions and salience of terms like “intersectionality” and “systemic racism,” with professors as likely to appear on their podcasts as politicians. Whether or not metropolitan liberals have undergone a genuine moral transformation in recent decades, anti-xenophobic and pro-diversity rhetoric has certainly prevailed in their spaces.

The media also fractured such that in the early twenty-first century, it was possible for people to only consume print, audio, and video that reinforced their political views and cultural tastes. With their hegemony over the media, metropolitan left-liberals were especially able to surround themselves with images of people of all backgrounds and identities sharing an urbane and convivial lifestyle. This tendency in culture and politics both enabled educated people’s low-stakes love of apparent difference and masked a major driver of their uniformity.

As universities in the United States and Europe increasingly relied on the tuition of international students and faculty with global expertise, diversification was visibly realized across college campuses and among educated professionals. However, where doctors and professors may differ by ancestry, religion, or family structure, they have one very deep similarity, which is the experience of succeeding in educational institutions and an identification with their mission. The professional-managerial class (PMC), with its reliance on academic, technical, and professional credentials, favors people with not only intellectual gifts but the social adroitness to manage their professions’ political economies, which interconnect collaboration and competition. To add to this mix, PMC culture’s defining ideal, namely “the pursuit of knowledge,” is strongly individualistic and competitive as well as simultaneously collectivist and high-minded. People who succeed in and identify with school education learn to judge themselves and their peers by how well they achieve goals they believe to confer both personal honor and social good. So while such people are indeed part of a community with diverse backgrounds, it is also true that the mission-oriented identities they acquire in graduate school or professional offices can override the salience of the differences with which they originally came.

Historically, this sensibility took root among the educated classes when nineteenth-century progressive reformers all over the world sought greater harmony in diversity through common schooling. Benedict Anderson has canonized the idea that in the nineteenth century, people all over the world shrank their imaginations of community down from expansive kingdoms of gods into narrow nation-states. Classical historians like Albert Hourani and George Antonius have shown us how the accommodating Ottoman Islamic vision gave way to a partisan politics that pitted Arab against non-Arab, neighbor against neighbor. However, the late nineteenth century was also a time of a reinvigorated imaginary of cosmopolitanism and inclusion as people and media traversed the globe and connected with each other in new ways. This is apparent, for example, in the way ulama, intellectuals, and Ottoman leaders sought to secure Muslim self-rule and cohabitation by speaking of many different ideals to different audiences. It is equally apparent in Abduh and his interlocutors, who made their appeals for unity in the great nineteenth-century idioms of nation, empire, language, race, science, religion, tradition, and progress.

Abduh’s Vision of Unity

Scholars, critics, and even Abduh’s own friends have disagreed about how successfully the reformer and activist kept his ideas consistent and focused. However, Abduh’s vision of inclusive knowledge-seeking becomes very clear when his life as an educator is in view. Few of Abduh’s views about politics, theology, or Islamic law found much assent in his lifetime or since. Yet a generation of social reformers all came to believe that universal education could simultaneously instill a love of learning and respect of differences just as Abduh imagined.

Where Abduh, the ulama, and politicians worried about how Muslims could adapt new technology and organizations to secure their fortunes and autonomy, ordinary parents also wanted their children to get ahead in a changing world. In Beirut, Christian missionary schools drew students across confessional lines even as they made evangelism a central part of the curriculum. In the 1880s, Abduh joined other Muslim educators in al-Madrasah al-Sultaniyyah (the Sultanic School), a private institution established to respond to the missionary challenge with ecumenical outreach and progressive pedagogy supported by the Islamic Benevolent Society. At the prompting of his brother, Abduh wrote up his lectures at the Sultaniyyah as risalat al-tawhid (Treatise on Unity).

Abduh’s treatise on tawhid has long received attention for its unique attempt to bridge medieval and nineteenth-century cosmologies. In theology, the term tawhid refers to the strict monotheism elaborated by Muslim theologians, but the word also evokes unity more broadly. In his famous essay, Abduh describes an Islamic political unity that requires more than a passive respect for diversity in religion. In an argument that foreign imperialism threatens all native people together, he sees that Muslims have a duty to protect others with all the force with which they protect themselves.

Abduh sees this kind of polity as directed to and cemented by intellectual conviviality. For him, “there is a spirit with which God imbues all his divine laws for rectifying of the intellect and the guide of reflection.” Abduh is saying that though the Quran distinguishes religious communities by different legal instructions from God, its words of guidance all point to the same kind of activity. This for him is the activity of “approaching every question in its right way and inquiring after every object by its causes.” Abduh argues that God enjoins mutuality, even fraternity, among different religious communities and “commands that debates always be undertaken in kindness.” He saw religious debate as a vital part of shared civic life.

Abduh further argues that a contending pluralistic society would best favor the Islamic religion’s universal appeal to reason. It is on this basis that he made his famous statement that Islam is “the first religion to address the rational mind.” In his time and since, scholars and critics have taken interest in how Abduh links nineteenth-century developments in natural sciences to the truth of the Islamic theology of tawhid. However, what stands out to me is not so much how he links science and theology as abstracted conceptual fields, but rather the human activities of learning about them. Simply put, Abduh imagines that people will both evangelize for their own religions and get along with people of others by engaging in the intellectual activities of studying, debating, and inquiring. His vision of a multifaith, intercommunal polity under Ottoman Islamic rule is principally an intellectual one. In explaining this view, he not only generalizes his own experiences as a cosmopolitan scholar, but also imagines that everyone else in society would organize their own lives and relate to others in this way.

It is this aspect that united many ulama and lay people to oppose Abduh in Beirut and beyond. As I have discussed elsewhere, many Muslim ulama who opposed mixed-confession education were not generally concerned with intermixing as such but about how students might develop similar ways of talking, dressing, and thinking that could make it difficult to distinguish Muslims from others. These ulama did not generally share Abduh’s experiences of collaborating with and debating against non-Muslims in such a way where they could share space and purpose, and they did not share his confidence that ordinary believers could do the same without concern about their religious commitments.

As Youshaa Patel has recently elaborated, ulama have long exhorted Muslims to distinguish themselves from others by dress and deportment. Abduh thought no less of this imperative, but in such writings as his infamous Transvaal fatwa, he reconciled this idea along curiously intellectual lines. He rather thought believers’ own minds and hearts sufficed to distinguish them from others. Though I have seen no evidence that Abduh dressed in European fashions, violated halal dietary norms, or socialized with women immodestly, rumor-mongers were able to spread these scandals by drawing on the fact that he was comfortable in others’ spaces. What makes Abduh’s idea of diversity historically distinct is not only that he imagines study and work as multi-faith activities but also that he imagines everyone partaking in them as formative experiences of individual and collective life.

In his famous tawhid treatise and many other works, Abduh generalizes the habits and ethics of scholarship to define a good human life in a multi-faith world. He thus transforms what traditional ulama had seen as a rare virtue into a universal requirement for the good life for all people. Abduh further conceives of this educational exercise as the habituated love of diversity just as liberals today do. However, both visions of inclusion rely on coercion.

Writings by Sultaniyyah students in the early twentieth century reveal a strict and censorious institution defined as much by the military ethic of Ottoman elites as by Abduh’s vision of multicultural inquiry. However, Taha Hussein’s (1889-1973) memoir of more traditional Islamic education reveals a parallel experience of drudgery and anxiety. These kinds of accounts are not unique to their time and place but suggest an experience shared by people in disciplinary institutions. The relatively few students who thrive in these institutions often identify much more closely with those institutions’ rules and attitudes than the majority of others. Similarly, today, the students who grow up and get knowledge-centered professional-managerial jobs (especially if they become educators themselves) have diverse backgrounds, religious commitments, and family structures. However, these diversities mask the commonality of their experience: they thrived in comprehensive conscriptionist schools and, succeeding so well in them, internalized their mission.

Integration and the Educational Divide

Though universal education as a desirable idea took rapid hold in the late nineteenth century, it took considerably longer to realize as an institutional practice. In other words, the classes of people who already experienced and identified with education nearly all assented to universalizing their vision of the good, but the creation and maintenance of inclusive education was considerably more complicated than agreeing with an idea in principle. In a popular critical work on education, Freddie deBoer states that it was not until 1970s that the United States achieved universal elementary schooling. According to him, this is just the moment when talk of a “crisis” of declining standards in academics and discipline became widespread. I would here extend deBoer’s analysis to say that by the late-twentieth century, the reality of public education was finally reaching the people who were the most socioeconomically distant from the classes who conceived the ideal.

Yet for left-liberals, the struggle against segregation overshadows all other parts of the story of educational expansion and its relationship to class and the state. The liberal account claims that white Southerners resisted integrated schooling with a unique pathology, and this account tends to ignore the fact that integration was promoted through coercive federal (and even military) force that left Black students especially vulnerable. When in the late-twentieth century federal authorities ordered busing to desegregate schools in cities like Boston, opposition to institutions that enforced intimacy with strangers was also forceful. Not only were Northern whites as susceptible to racist ideologies as those in the South, they also resisted losing what little local control they had and came to see education and the economic changes it facilitated as leaving them behind.

Although inequality increased dramatically in the late-twentieth century, the results of educational change were not uniformly disempowering. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, higher education consistently expanded, and while the most prestigious and powerful employment sectors like tech and finance have remained the most exclusive, the professions of law, medicine, and academia have become considerably more diverse. It is from this vantage point that I stress that Atlantic liberals are not merely kidding themselves about diversity. College towns and PMC enclaves in cities really are diverse. We who have family, friends, and colleagues who come from all over the world really do structure our lives through genteel, rule-bound competition and collaboration for shared career goals. When populists claim that immigrants threaten our way of life and our future, they are simply not talking to our culture or lived experience.

However, that culture and way of life was shaped through an extremely partial experience, which is flourishing in school. Opinion polls show that few people enjoy or look forward to school. As the perception that people need school to find good jobs has diminished, so has trust in a system that forces people into uncomfortable situations. The people who experience school as a place for peace and growth have more diverse backgrounds than they have ever had, but they are united by support for and comfort in modern educational institutions that are strikingly different from most other people. This cultural gulf is so wide that opposition to educational-reformist ideas of diversity and meritocracy has proven a durable political link between rich reactionaries and precarious majorities of voters.

Two Thoughts on Abduh’s Failures

Instead of looking to Abduh’s failures at promoting mixed education merely to criticize the idea of public schools or promote an alternative model, I conclude with two thoughts on how our educationally polarized politics can learn from his experience. First, although Abduh and likeminded reformists advocated the idea that everyone had to go to school to learn respect for diversity and pride in their own community, they themselves did not come out of such institutions. Rather, Abduh was inculcated in the tradition of Islamic higher education with roots in the Middle Ages that trained the discernment of religious scholars. These ulama came from all over the Islamic world to study in places like Cairo’s 1000-year old Al-Azhar, where Abduh studied. Though Abduh felt a reverential love for as well as a reflexive skepticism toward this curriculum, his belief that inclusion fosters the love of learning was shaped through his narrow experience of the ulama way of life. In this way, we can see that ideals of inclusion and self-respect institutionalized in our education system today are not limited to such a system.

My second thought is the cautionary reminder that the ulama enjoy with Muslim communities an organic relationship of trust and respect that liberal academia and the professional class simply do not have with society broadly today. Though they have tried, through educational coercion and media dominance, to universalize their experience of tolerance and love of learning, they have failed so thoroughly that the broader public in the United States and elsewhere seems poised to reject everything those ideals touch—from competitive elections to the court system—rather than endure more diversity “shoved down our throats.” This is obviously not the time for proponents of equality and solidarity (PMC or otherwise) to retreat from political action, but that action cannot be premised on the belief that the hard work and limited gains most people experience in school will result in a mutualistic love for the truth. Our inspiration from the ambitious optimism of progressive-era reformers like Abduh must also reflect a full knowledge of their partiality and limits.

When I moved to the United Kingdom in 2013, I thought Islam had six pillars: the declaration of faith, the five daily prayers, the fasting of Ramadan, the giving of alms, and the two pilgrimages: one to Makkah, and the other, naturally, to Dubai.

It was about five years after my conversion to Islam, and almost everyone I knew or followed on social media seemed committed to visiting Dubai at least once a year. Had Hajj become so expensive that Dubai replaced Makkah? The rituals were rather similar: circumambulating the Dubai Mall seven times, camping for a night in the desert, and throwing money (rather than pebbles in Mina) at consumer items ranging from designer clothes to A5 wagyu steaks.

Now, more than a decade later, the craze for Dubai has not subsided a whit (if the global popularity of Dubai chocolate is any indicator). As a sociologist researching Muslim-related issues in Euro-America, I have often wondered: what attracts so many Muslims—especially in the West—to Dubai?

Homeless Dreams

Dubai is not what it used to be. For anyone serious about corporate money today, Riyadh is the place to go. Dubai’s wannabe entrepreneurs, high-flying workers, and social media celebrities are now barely making ends meet—or trying to hold in place the cracked veneer of a six-star lifestyle. Everything is rented or on loan. From housing, to cars, to designer handbags, life in Dubai is simply becoming less and less affordable.1 And no, Dubai is not free of crime (unless you think white-collar crime doesn’t count).2 Only Dubai’s reputation as a tax haven still holds, alongside its infamy as the largest hub for sex work (and scandals) in the Middle East. Despite these realities, many people from around the world regularly vacation in Dubai, and some even contemplate permanently resettling there by making “hijra.”

Hijra, in its original sense, refers to the migration to Medina of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from the oppression they faced in Makkah. Their aim was to freely build a true Muslim society. Today, any escape from an environment perceived as hostile to Muslims (typically “the West”) tends, haphazardly, to be described as a “hijra.” Yet much disagreement surrounds it as both a practice and an idea. While many British and American Muslims dream of making hijra to Dubai for its comforts, I have known people who made hijra to Tunisia in order to build a village in the desert from scratch, and others who made hijra to Jordan to set up a permaculture community. I have also met many French Muslims who made hijra within Europe itself—to the British city of Birmingham, for example. And while Dubai is a coveted hijra destination for many, the reality is that plenty of others who live and work there today contemplate migrating to “greener pastures” in Malaysia, Türkiye, Bosnia, or elsewhere across Asia and Europe. Everyone is looking for something different under the banner of “hijra.”

Romanticization plays some role here. In the twenty-first century, Islamic revivalist movements and popular culture have sold the Muslim diaspora the dream of a lost, romantic past: the times of the Revelation, the Golden Age of Islamic civilization under the Abbasids, the imperial strength of the Ottomans, and so on. These are depicted as times when Muslims were strong, affluent, and in power. The Islamicate of the past is imagined as untouched by the modern corruptions of the “West.” Television series like Omar and Diriliş: Ertuğrul, charismatic athletic figures like MMA champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, and scenes like the Speakers’ Corner “dawah” debates on social media are all highly popular because they piggyback on images of power that redress a collective loss of self-esteem. “We, Muslims, were once victorious,” so the mantra goes.

Curiously, this longing for the “golden age” of Islam often trades diasporic Asian, African, and Levantine cultures for the Arabian Peninsula’s own local, khaliji customs. Khaliji culture is perceived as “purer” because of its proximity to the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the holy sites of Makkah and Madinah. This image of purity is also the fruit of a concerted campaign by Saudi Arabia which, since the Cold War and under American influence, has sought to spread a particular form of Saudi-supremacist Islam to Euro-America.3 As a result, South Asian men in London can be heard calling themselves akhi instead of bhai, and can be seen in white thobes and head caps (remnants of Zoroastrianism) instead of shalwar kameez, djellabas, or bazin.4 These were among the ways that British Islamicate cultures sought to relocate themselves in an Arab and Middle Eastern imaginary, by asking “how can we live like the first Muslims did?” For many, Dubai emerges as an answer because it has both the aesthetics of “Islamic traditionalism” and the power of a regional hegemon.

Yet the search for a more empowered and authentic “Muslim” identity (conflated with “Arab” identity) by a homeless diaspora is not the only driver of hijra-cum-Dubai mania. It might not even be an especially important factor. The fact is that Muslims don’t migrate to Dubai in search of an alternative lifestyle, but to find an even deeper sense of comfort. In Dubai, your business loan can be as “halal” as your Big Mac. For many, that is an attractive promise.

Halalified Comfort

Anyone who visits downtown Dubai would scratch their head trying to find what differentiates it from any other large American urban center like Los Angeles or New York. The city itself was designed by British urban planner John Harris and modeled after large American metropolises with a focus on leisure and entertainment similar to Las Vegas.5 In the present day, one can find in Dubai all the comforts of any large American city: efficient public transit, luxury resorts, sports facilities, suburban houses in gated communities with swimming pools, and perhaps most importantly, all the major banks and fast-food chains of the world stamped with a big “halal” sign. The neoliberal structure of the Euro-American economy is perfectly reproduced in Dubai, and its rampant consumerism, unchecked capitalism, and exploitative labor practices all feel very familiar. These familiarities often play a greater role in attracting “Muslim migrants” than anything about Islam itself.

From mortgages and food to scam crypto projects, Dubai is a place where the uncritical copy-paste of Westernese life is custom-fit for a Muslim audience. There you can find, for example, Global Village, a giant theme park which aspires to be nothing more than a sort of Muslamic Disneyland. You can also purchase ZamZam water in $30 glass bottles, grab a nice glass of “halal” wine or champagne, visit the city’s all-new “halal” casinos, and purchase designer “Muslimwear” like the Nike hijab. These “halal” offerings not only commercialize Islam into a brand devoid of values and meaning but destroy the socio-spiritual and ethical fabric of a community. Muslims are not seen as two billion believers but two billion consumers. Labelling things “halal” without changing any of their questionable ethics has a name: “Islam by technicalities.” Anything can be made “halal” for the right amount of money. Going to the Las Vegas of the Middle East permits a life without hesitations or second guesses. You’ll never need to examine any food labels for traces of pork gelatin ever again. The trade-off is silent compliance: never question how everything around you is built and produced. Just consume and enjoy.

The commercialization of Islam represents an effort to depoliticize Muslims and disconnect them from their moral frameworks.6 What better way to erase the meaning of the hijab, for example, than to turn it into a fashion accessory? When people tell me about their role models, saying they want to see a Muslim Elon Musk, a Muslim Mark Zuckerberg, or a Muslim Rupert Murdoch, I always wonder why nobody thinks instead of a British Malcolm X, an American al-Ghazali, or a European Rabia al-Adawiyya. Why is it always white, rich, secular males who often have a disdain for Muslims that we take as role models? That so many Muslims cheered Hamza Yusuf’s engagement with Jordan Peterson, or the conversion to Islam of redpiller Andrew Tate, suggests that, despite seeing the “West” as an antagonist, Muslims still crave its validation. This is understandable for people who, for generations, have been deprived of financial stability, media representation, and political visibility.

This is part of the reason Dubai is so appealing: it is seen as the bastion of an imagined cultural and economic revenge on life. And in a twisted way, it is. But if retail therapy is not the answer, then what is?

Between Duty and Divestment

Perhaps a real hijra requires a move away from structures of oppression, not the “West.” The Palestinian-American professor Hatem Bazian says Muslims should be guided by a shared ethos which “must be about severing our relationship to products produced by corporation[s] in sweatshops [in] far distant lands, [and which use] the poverty of people to maximize profit while treating them as modern wage slaves.” The writer Ali Harfouch similarly urges us to “revolt against the Homo Economicus [the human that earns, produces, and consumes]” and to stop worshipping the “god of Capital.”

Bazian and Harfouch are right. We need to boycott and divest from systems of oppression around us, not just the amorphous idea of “the West.” By convincing ourselves that the problem is “the West” and not, say, rampant neoliberalism, we delude ourselves into thinking an “escape” to Dubai fulfills an ethical imperative. Ironically, Dubai is in fact a Western city par excellence and one of the global centers of neoliberal life.

Still, absolute divestment, both materially and ideologically, is no easy task. And, perhaps more importantly, it is not clear that “hijra” is the means by which to achieve it. If I were to “make hijra,” what happens to those I leave behind who cannot afford the luxury of packing up and leaving? Don’t I have a duty and responsibility toward them, given the privileges, resources, and knowledge I possess? Since I have learned how to navigate this society—my own home and community—who am I really benefitting by suddenly relocating to another, foreign place?

Beyond divestment, however, is the question of flourishing. Who will build the alternatives to the systems that we boycott? In a way, I believe these alternatives already exist, and we must actively nurture them. They are “too grassroots” to feature in mainstream media, not flashy enough to be “Instagrammable,” and they often fly under the radar of public attention. Whether it is through community hubs, artists collectives, alternative media platforms, healthcare initiatives, or even ethical fintech start-ups, people are constantly strategizing and organizing in response to the Dubaization of our lives. They are living out an alternative in the margins.

Perhaps some will argue there is a third path and that building alternatives requires resources which many marginalized communities cannot access. Accordingly, temporarily moving to Dubai, making a lot of tax-free money through corporate work, and then returning home can seem to make sense. Can’t Dubai, and the Gulf states more broadly, be a means to a righteous end? What if we took advantage of Dubai as a money pump with the aim of redistributing wealth within our own communities? While the idea is tempting, the fact remains that, in one way or another, we are contributing to an economy heavily reliant on exploitation. Isn’t every economic migrant from the West just fodder for Dubai to accelerate its growth?

In the videogame Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the first mission is set in 2029 Dubai—or, more exactly, the ruins of Dubai. In a near future where the Emirate overly relies on unstable technology and questionable labor practices, a technological catastrophe leads workers to commit acts of violence, destroying properties and forcing people to flee. As a result, you—the player—are left roaming in a half-built luxury resort, admiring the skyline of the abandoned city. The deeper we wade into the age of agentic AI and technological acceleration, the less Deus Ex seems like fiction. Cataclysm or not, it is public knowledge that the Emirates’ natural reserves are limited. It is not a matter of if, but when, the oil reserves and money dry out. The cracks are already showing.

What will we do, then, when Dubai falls? Where will we go? We owe it to ourselves to start imagining a future without Dubai and all it represents while also thinking seriously and honestly about the limitations of “hijra” as we seek to build a better world.

The unexpected death of Asad Haider last November came as a major shock to everyone that was touched by his writing and work. Asad was a couple of years younger than me, but I looked up to him as a mentor. His presence on the left was like a lighthouse that illuminated the limits of our present and called us back to the emancipatory tradition. I first met Asad when he joined my study group on Sylvain Lazarus’ Anthropology of the Name during the height of the George Floyd uprising in the summer of 2020. Still reeling from Covid-related lockdowns, many of us would protest by day and meet at night over Zoom to discuss the thought of this relatively obscure French Maoist. Asad had recently published a best-selling book titled Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology,1 a coming-of-age story that documents the travails of his Pakistani Muslim family and the challenges he faced in a post-9/11 world. The book offered a Marxist critique of both the post-racial centrism that emerged in the wake of Obama and the hyper-racial liberalism that seemed to accompany the rise of Trump.

The book drew fiery responses and it catapulted Asad into a spokesperson for his generation. But unlike most political spokespeople who rise to prominence, Asad was different. He had immersed himself so deeply in the Marxist canon that, when he spoke, it quickly became evident that he was a visionary whose political acumen was deep and set on restoring the emancipatory tradition in our time. This seriousness of erudition was only slightly offset by his jovial smile and laid-back demeanor. It was often very difficult to discern much anxiety in Asad when he spoke—his sentences seemed to come together as if he were rehearsing a paper with ease.

What caused me to have immediate affection toward Asad was that, when I first met him, he told my reading group that he was undergoing “self-criticism,” meaning he was re-considering his core views based on the responses his book generated. Asad explained that he was criticized both as “too Marxist” for enveloping race into class, and as “not Marxist enough” for thinking racial struggles could be emancipatory in themselves. The latter critique, he said, was the more influential on his thought and led him to think about what a more comprehensive theory of class would be (although he admitted that such a project was not what the book set out to achieve). The way that Asad responded to these criticisms did not lead him to recoil in passivity, nor did it lead him to double down on his initial viewpoint.

Asad’s self-criticism was akin to the type of self-criticism that his intellectual mentor, Louis Althusser, developed: a self-criticism that led the latter to discover what he called a “new practice of philosophy.” It is rare that an intellectual is elevated to the status of a trusted voice on the left, and when they are, we expect a lot from them. For a short period of time—too short indeed—Asad became the intellectual of our generation; he became a voice for a generation facing unprecedented political instability and fallout from events that overwhelmed our resolve and capacity to mount a fight. We have been defined by 9/11, the Iraq War, the economic crash of 2008, as much as we have sought to mount an offensive through Occupy Wall Street, the Floyd uprising, and Bernie Sanders’ electoral efforts in left populism. Asad developed a method for re-introducing communist thought and practice amidst this chaotic conjecture in which we find ourselves.

Asad completed his dissertation on the problem of political organization coming out of postwar French Marxism from the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, the same department which produced American luminaries and political thinkers such as Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton and philosopher Donna Haraway. This area of study gave him a broad mastery in the philosophical renaissance that we know as twentieth-century French philosophy—from leading epistemologists Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès, to the world-historical philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan. But Asad’s primary philosophical master was Althusser, the most important Marxist among the postwar French philosophers. To read or listen to Asad was to sense a thinker that had absorbed Althusser’s lessons in such a deep and thorough way that it was evident the latter’s problematic lived on through him and animated all that he thought. Indeed, it was the lineage of Marxist philosophers that emerged from Althusser’s school with whom Asad would most strongly identify.

Next to Althusser, it was Alain Badiou, the prominent French polymath, and his comparatively obscure militant comrade, Sylvain Lazarus, to whom Asad was most drawn. What Badiou offered Asad was the affirmation that emancipatory politics is about the capacity to make a decision on an event which brings about something new. This precise capacity to decide on political activity is what is made to be impossible in the world of capitalism. Badiou’s materialist Platonism offered an alternative to the sense of capitalist realism that seemed to swallow our generation whole. His investigations pointed to historical moments in which groups of workers seized a collective power to break from the inertia of our present.

Lazarus provided Asad with the tools to completely rethink socialist praxis and education. As co-founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine, the open-source journal of Marxist study and politics, Asad and his team curated some of the most important journal issues on key themes and topics in Marxism. One such issue was dedicated to the concept of “workers’ inquiry,” a method through which socialists orient the locus of political activity in the factory and workers’ jobsites, in an effort to generate a politics centered on workers’ demands grounded in their determination and thought. Workers’ inquiry is the best means through which to generate new knowledge of our situation in order to understand and act politically as socialists. Lazarus stands uniquely in the history of Marxism as a thinker who seems to have cracked a riddle that has plagued Marxist and communist practice since the dawn of the socialist movement in the early 1800s. This riddle is found in the dialectic of theory and practice—specifically, in confronting the question: how are the abstract ideas of socialism and communism to be realized in the concrete practical struggles of workers? This is a problem that Marx identified as early as 1843 when he wrote to the young Hegelian socialist Arnold Ruge:

the whole principle of socialism is concerned only with one side, namely the reality of the true existence of man. We have also to concern ourselves with the other side, i.e., with man’s theoretical existence, and make his religion and science, etc., into the object of our criticism.

In this same letter, Marx went on to make a deeply philosophical claim about the origin of ideas and whence they emerge. Lo and behold, Marx’s answer is that ideas do not emerge in the lofty heights of abstract principles of communism but rather out of the existing struggles of this world. As such, Marx stresses that, as socialists, we should not confront the world with “new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it!” Marx instead argued that, as socialists, we must

develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.

Lazarus’s political thought extends the insight that the young Marx made to Ruge, but on a far more comprehensive scale. This entails developing a method for socialists to inquire into existing sites of struggle to gauge political novelty in a given situation, whether that be a labor struggle at a job site, a protest movement against imperialist war and aggression, or an immigrant justice movement. Lazarus develops a strategy for locating the rational core of novel thinking—thinking that reflects the group’s interior relation to their demands, which is the emancipatory kernel of the group—and elevated it to the level of a new principle for political action. This method implies an entirely new orientation to political education itself in that it reverses the hierarchal pedagogy which tends to force workers to adhere their action to a prescribed idea of political emancipation. Emancipatory politics is not about teaching the proletariat “how to think,” but rather starts with a decision based on this fundamentally egalitarian maxim: “people think.” The consequences from this starting point change everything about how we conduct politics. As Asad remarks in his essay “Socialists Think”:

We can’t possibly know what principles will be active in political situations ahead of time. To know about them in their specificity, we have to conduct investigations which begin from the recognition that workers think. This is an investigation which does not assume we know what workers think, but assigns priority to learning about their thought.

In order to understand Lazarus’s contribution and impact on Asad’s own thought, we must consider the distinction he makes between a relation of thought and a relation to thought. The latter is what Lazarus names “objectal” politics, in which an exterior process dictates the thinking process, hence “to” something outside of its own process. A politics in interiority is one in which a people’s thinking has developed a relation of the real of thought as such. Such a mode of interiority is rare and sequential. Politics in interiority is marked by a collapse of knowledge within a situation, that is, by a collapse of a collective group’s reliance on what Lazarus called “objectal thought.” As Asad concludes in his essay:

Let’s adopt this founding statement in our own internal discussions and the decisions regarding our internal organization. Let’s reject the dictation from above, which provides ready-made answers to externally imposed questions, and instead say: socialists think.

Lazarus’s system is intellectually humbling, and it is no surprise that Asad found in it a wellspring for an entirely new epistemology for militant politics. Based on the insights of Lazarus, Asad also identified two dangers in our political moment: betrayal and nostalgia. What Asad saw coming was the end of a sequence of militant politics, one that was opened by Occupy and which led to the Floyd uprising. He argued that we face the threat of increasing depoliticization that the end of this sequence will inevitably kick up, and warned that the left will increasingly come to see the project of emancipation with a sense of futility and corruption. This is a result of the ending and dissolution of a sequence of politics in which the terms “socialist” and “communist” become reduced to little more than identities whose content is policed—something Asad warned against but was optimistic we could confront.

Above all, it is his sense of egalitarian optimism—so grievously lacking in our time—that ensures Asad’s memory will endure.2

“What life have you if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community.” So wrote T. S. Eliot in a 1934 piece lamenting the modern loss of communal and religious life. Less than a century later, we find words like these deployed to advertise digital platforms like Discord and Slack. We are now seeing—at a dizzying pace—commercial and digital communication platforms utilizing the word “community” to describe what is either a glorified group chat, or a collective of people who pay for a subscription to use a specific service or product. The corporate capture of the term “community” is now so totalizing that its use as a sales pitch no longer strikes us as odd or wrong.

Take the online platform “Skool,” which has been advertising aggressively to me over the past few weeks, after the algorithm discovered I am a poet:

The pretense to “building community” falls completely flat here: this is really about productizing your art (in this case, my poetry) for the content economy and leveraging the feeling of “community” to make money. And while the algorithm continues to feed us ads like this, traditional funding streams and patronage for the arts become smaller every year—the beneficiaries of these old models are now expected to assimilate themselves into the new models that Skool and other similar companies offer as a service.

Notably, Skool’s co-founder, Daniel Kang, signs-off his personal website in the following way:

If you’re building something meaningful, curious about communities, or just want to trade ideas, I’m always open to a conversation.

The curiosity someone may have about communal life—perhaps about schooling, childcare initiatives, or the building of third places—is not what is being referred to here. What is really meant by this seemingly innocuous sentence is that if you want to understand how to monetize a digital service to a group of people with a shared interest, contact this person because he is proficient in the “skill” of delivering “community” to you as a monetizable service. One of the other reasons Kang frames his statement in such a vague manner is that straightforwardly explaining the economic incentives behind it would cause the veil of innocence to fall. Put simply, corporate entities and the people who run them know that speaking plainly about their motives will not work in a culture that is becoming increasingly aware of the brutality of the modern economy.

Lesser-known companies like Skool might just employ soft-toned “community speak” as a marketing strategy, but for corporate behemoths like Amazon and McDonald’s, millions of dollars are invested to convince the public they are wholesome places to work as well as staples of your community. Their aim is to produce heartwarming advertisements to counter stories about union busting and poor working conditions—realities which hinder and harm actual communities. Financially strained workers who chronicle their brutal working conditions in established media outlets can simply be drowned out by the contrived, “positive” advertisements these corporations regularly commission.

But the attempt to soften hyper-capitalism is not limited to ad-washing after, say, a workers’ rights scandal; it is part of a more general trend to convince people that these legal entities pose no threat to the wellbeing of communities in particular and societies at large. This is why we are witnessing an explosion of “community management” roles, which have little to do with supporting or growing actual communities and almost everything to do with managing them for corporate interest and profit. What used to be “client management” or “customer management” is now commonly “community management.”

Take WeWork, the global purveyor of warm and trendy office spaces. The employees hired to maintain relationships with paying customers are, predictably, called “community managers.” They have an entire section on their website called “community stories”—a curated selection of narratives from and about their paying customers. Many of the showcased stories are of companies that are helpful for WeWork’s brand, like someone working on recycling, or the promising developments of some health-tech firm. There is no way of knowing if these types of private enterprises are reflective of their customer base, but the overwhelming likelihood is that they are not. The investment banking giant Goldman Sachs (which incidentally worked on WeWork’s failed IPO) rented a WeWork office in Birmingham, England, but didn’t make the cut for community stories. While it is clear what this kind of “purpose-washing” is for, one has to question if, on some level, these entities are trying to convince themselves as well as us of the fiction they perpetuate.

What Is a Community?

If global group chats between World of Warcraft superfans and companies who rent real estate in the same office building are not communities, then what are? A useful starting point to answer this question is visualizing a physical place—“meatspace,” if you will. Ray Oldenburg’s “third place” thesis is especially useful here. In The Great Good Place, he writes:

Subsequent training in sociology helped me to understand that when the good citizens of a community find places to spend pleasurable hours with one another for no specific or obvious purpose, there is purpose to such association.1

What I find most striking here is the contrast between the lack of a “specific and obvious purpose” in organic communities, and the narrow purposes of modern corporate “communities.” Corporate-born communities are astroturfed projects that fabricate connections through shared “interests” that include purchasing the same brand of drink holder or productivity software, for example. These “communities” have their own broad structural qualities in that they are usually non-physical (members are unlikely to ever meet), formed for a specific reason or interest (contra Oldenburg), and are trapped behind a paywall (thus making purchasing power the limiting, necessary, and determining point of entry).

These structures are exclusionary and promote a kind of endless reclusion into ever-narrower niches that promise “freedom” from the frictions of actual communal life. Put differently, the kind of life that these structures pull you away from are precisely those which force you to confront others with different interests and viewpoints, which is crucial to developing sympathy and empathy. The alternative is being a member of multiple online communities where the frictions of life are attenuated to the satisfaction of their members.

The corporate and digital versions of community are proliferating at the same time that physical community spaces such as libraries are closing down or losing members. As Philip Slater says, “a community life exists when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows.” The attraction of online communities, and what they specifically lack, facilitate declining active memberships in more “traditional” communities. Be they mosques, churches, or libraries, the messy humanity of coming up against a foe, or holding the hand of an elder, becomes less likely if we start to exist in our group chats alone.

Gyms, cafes, barbershops, and libraries still exist, and some are even thriving in popularity. These types of institutions are often given as examples of Oldenburg’s third place. However, many of these places, specifically those that are for-profit institutions, are increasingly built around an idea of exclusivity. They promote the flattening, corporate “find your tribe” style of community, which eliminates friction in the same way that online special interest group chats do.

An actual tribe connotes kinship in the literal sense—multiple generations in the same physical area, and ties of blood and honor. This is a far cry from a gym inviting you to “find your tribe” by giving them a recurring monthly chunk of your paycheck. The honor of the other regulars is not your business by design. Take the perfectly named Third Space luxury gym franchise, where memberships start at a tidy £245 ($330 USD) per month. This is on one level a type of third place—neither home nor workplace—but it fails the traditional definition of that term by being inaccessible to the vast majority of people on the basis of social class. It is purposefully elitist in a way that a café in a rich neighborhood that incidentally serves people of the same social class isn’t.

Why Bother?

If humans are social creatures and speaking animals, then a reduction in sociality and speaking to one another is existential. The negative effects of digital communities are compounded further by the degradation of communication brought about by AI. Often, the selling point of these communities is that they connect people from all over the world. But if that connection runs parallel to a reduction in the quality of communication itself, then even the purported benefits will give us ever-diminishing returns.

If all these disparate digital platforms are “hosting” communities, then we cheapen the places where real communality occurs in all its beauty and ugliness. It is impossible not to experience that process of cheapening when your local library closes, or when you can’t leave your children with neighbors while you go to get groceries—all while you’re being promised membership in various “communities” by fan forums on the Internet. The effects of a loss in shared communal place are felt acutely by those who may have grown up with them—to us, it is impossible not to experience this loss viscerally. It is precisely this group or generation that bears the burden of resurrecting communality; those who have grown up without it might not know what they are missing. We need to call out these parasitic entities, plainly expose their subscription businesses for what they are, and allow organic communities to be rebuilt from the ground up. If we don’t—to return to Eliot—we risk not knowing or caring who our neighbors are.

Dear Readers,

We are delighted to share our final issue of the year with you, following our successful summer edition on Authenticity. The essays in this collection address a variety of topics concerning community and crisis, examined both together and separately, with a focus on questions of education, migration, democracy, international conflict, and more.

As with our previous issues, we’re releasing this one gradually to give you time to sit with each essay. Our first two essays—on the challenges of disarming groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and the curious history of rescuing American democracy by “authoritarian” means—are now available.

If you value our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a donation. As an ad-free, independent publication, we rely solely on your support to keep going.

With gratitude,

The Muftah Team

Is Disarming Hezbollah and Hamas Possible?

Emidio Lev Rahmani

When Populism and Authoritarianism Saved Democracy

Moshik Temkin

Your Subscription Service Is Not a Community

Jamal Mehmood

“Socialists Think”: In Memory of Asad Haider

Daniel Tutt

We Need to Rethink the Meaning and Purpose of “Hijra”

William Barylo

Muhammad Abduh and the Educational Roots of Liberal Cosmopolitanism

Tim Gutmann

Is Inter-Class Solidarity Possible in a Stratified Community?

Bassem Elbendary

The Unbearable Lightness of Post-Communism

Robert James Warren

Like many other parts of the so-called democratic world, the United States is living through a moment which, to the politically sensitive, feels dystopian, ominous, and cynical. Our era is hard to define in any simple way, and it is perhaps harder to see a positive path forward. But it seems that in the political realm—both nationally and globally—we are in an era of increasing authoritarianism; democratic and authoritarian countries alike are moving in more authoritarian directions. The United States, in particular, represents the tricky but fascinating case of an established democracy gradually morphing into a strange hybrid of democracy and authoritarianism.

What used to be called “democratic backsliding” now seems like a quaint term—that train has long departed the station. The real debate is not whether the United States is still a democracy (formally, it is), but about the causes of democracy’s degradation. For the legacy media, segments of the political class, and many elites in the Ivy League (at least those who haven’t decamped to Canada in their flight from fascism in New Haven), blame for democracy’s deterioration—and specifically, for many, the rise of Trump—lies primarily with the public for falling prey to “disinformation.” This is how we get the spectacle of Hillary Clinton, for example, blaming TikTok for why younger Americans have turned against Israel after two years of American-backed devastation in Gaza. The implication is that, instead of watching reels on their phones, young people should get their information from such reliable sources as CBS News or the Washington Post, both of which happen to be controlled by “neutral” multi-billionaires. For these elites, if we are in a democratic crisis, it is because too many people are uneducated, foolish, and tricked—this is purportedly why they support conmen and autocrats.

In other words, the working assumption among many observers of authoritarianism—especially of the mainstream liberal persuasion—is that a democracy can become authoritarian when the people turn to a strongman-type leader who exploits their grievances by appealing to their worst instincts. But any serious person must dig deeper than this. We first need to acknowledge the fact that, although we are in a severe crisis of democracy, not everyone will be affected by or even notice it; how severe one thinks the crisis is often depends on where one stands in society. Many of our elites might be fine with the current state of affairs if only because it benefits them economically. The crisis feels most palpable when we abandon the individualistic frame and consider the issue structurally and historically.

The Great Depression

One significant moment of rising authoritarianism in the United States occurred in the 1930s, during the Great Depression—a historical moment that offers several important lessons for own day. The severity of the Depression is badly underappreciated today. The collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, itself the result of an unregulated market economy that resembled a giant Ponzi scheme, sparked a chain reaction that quickly led to the worst economic crisis the modern capitalist world has known. Many of the millions of victims of the Depression had never heard of Wall Street, let alone visited it, but they lost absolutely everything because of it—their jobs and livelihoods determined by the activities of the Dow Jones Index. Incredibly, after everything that happened in the world, then and since, not much has changed: the economic fate of most people still depends on what that index looks like, even though they have nothing to do with it and may not even fully understand its operations.

By 1931, the economic crisis became global and people in different parts of the world learned the hard way how interconnected their respective national economies had become (although “globalization” hadn’t yet become a household term). The political consequences of high unemployment and runaway inflation were infamously disastrous in Germany—and later, the rest of the world. In East Asia, Japan was deeply impacted by the crash; since three out of eight Japanese agricultural farmers relied on silk cocoon sales in the 1920s, the Japanese economy promptly shrank by 10% once Western women could no longer afford to buy silk items. As in the case of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan only “recovered” through massive military buildup and, eventually, violent imperial conquests. After 1933, Nazi Germany, along with the Bolshevik Soviet Union, seemed to be the only countries impervious to economic collapse. Liberal democracies seemed to be goners, and young intellectuals of the 1930s took note.

Back in the United States—the point of origin of the crisis—Americans experienced unprecedented hardship. Social dislocation and massive unemployment caused men to leave their families in pursuit of work, only to become drifters. There were melodramatic stories about rich bankers losing everything and jumping out of windows, but in reality, the Depression was most devastating for those who were already poor. The hardest hit were, unsurprisingly, those who suffered most from brutalization and structural discrimination: African Americans.

This crisis was the retrospectively-unsurprising setting for a true authoritarian moment. President Herbert Hoover, elected in 1928 (despite never having held office) on a wave of admiration for his achievements as a brilliant engineer, manager, humanitarian, and entrepreneur who helped deliver food to war-torn Europe, soon became the least popular President in American history. Americans spoke of the “Hoover Depression” and resented his aloof optimism. Hoover’s promise that “prosperity is just around the corner” fell flat as people felt crushed and abandoned by their government.

Hoover’s nonchalance morphed into an ominous kind of authoritarianism in early 1932 when approximately 17,000 World War I veterans known as the “Bonus Army”—many of them homeless and unemployed—gathered in Washington, D.C. with their families to demand early payment of a wartime service bonus not due until 1945. Hoover opposed the Bonus Army’s demand along with Congress and most of the political class. Arguably, there was some logic to his position, since veterans’ benefits already took up 25% of the 1932 federal budget. But these were not logical times.

Following Hoover’s rejection, around 10,000 veterans remained in Washington, living in a sort of shantytown and in abandoned government buildings. Their presence just steps away from the White House was an embarrassment to the President. After police shot to death two veterans during a commotion, the supposedly-steady Hoover lost his bearings. Apparently fearing a revolutionary uprising, and convinced that the Bonus Army consisted of dangerous communists, he summoned General Douglas MacArthur—a man hardly known for his subtlety or finesse. Accordingly, MacArthur assembled an army led by Generals George Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower who were ordered to attack the Bonus Army, entering the shantytown and burning it down. Fifty-five people were injured, a pregnant woman miscarried, and a twelve-week old baby boy died from tear gas inhalation. The public reaction was rightly furious. The cold, technocratic instincts that had served Hoover well pre-crisis were failing him now. They led him to see the Bonus Army as criminals and subversives, instead of what they really were—desperate people who had sacrificed for their country.

What happened to the Bonus Army was an ominous first sign of democracy’s fragility in a time of severe crisis. But who was threatening democracy at this point—the Bonus Army, by “occupying” Washington, or the Hoover administration which burned down the tents in which desperate families were hunkered? The question becomes especially loaded when we recall that some of the earliest supporters of fascists and Nazis in Europe were disgruntled veterans who felt betrayed by their liberal-democratic governments.

The Unlikely FDR

With Hoover’s reputation underwater, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), then-Governor of New York, crushed him in the 1932 election. It may seem surprising today, but in 1933 many observers believed FDR would be even less effective than Hoover at dealing with the crisis, if only for biographical reasons. After all, FDR was a privileged aristocrat from New York’s Hudson Valley, whereas Hoover was from a small town in Iowa and pulled himself up from meager beginnings. Hoover had excelled in his studies and professional life, while FDR for most of his early life had coasted on his privilege. At Harvard, FDR was a glorified frat boy, joining endless clubs and earning mediocre grades. He later failed to graduate from law school at Columbia, but wanted to enter politics with the idea of becoming President someday. His inspiration was his distant cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, the mythic former President.

Aside from his great last name, FDR seemed to have little going for him. In retrospect, we know that this was a superficial assessment of the young man. As Secretary of the Navy in the Woodrow Wilson administration, and then as Governor of New York, he began to show real political talent, dynamic policymaking, and a capacity for leadership. But even when he entered the White House, many considered him a lightweight who was elected more because of Hoover’s ineptitude than for his own appeal. No one was ready for just how FDR would face the crisis inherited from Hoover—with a mix of radical democracy and a dose of centralized authoritarianism.

FDR turned out to be an outstanding politician, able to communicate effectively with the public and stave off serious challenges to the system. According to the historian Richard Hofstadter, the glib optimism and boyish enthusiasm that made FDR look like a lightweight at the outset became, in a sense, the essence of his political program. Indeed, FDR transmitted his personal confidence to the nation at large. He knew, as opposed to Hoover, that in a modern mass society, personality in politics is extremely important. He was one of the first political figures to make effective use of the radio with his famous “Fireside Chats” broadcasts, in which he described the New Deal policies his administration was undertaking on behalf of the American people.

Yet contrary to what many elite liberal commentators seem to believe today, media-savviness—whether on the radio in 1935 or on TikTok in 2025—is not sufficient for political success; the policies behind one’s media strategy have to be good for the message to really work. FDR understood this well, and his ability to fuse substance with style helped him confront perhaps the biggest domestic political challenge he had to face during his first term: Louisiana’s Huey Long. In 1932, after one term as Governor of Louisiana, Long ran for the Senate and was easily elected. After that, although he had no official function in Louisiana’s government, he became what can only be described as the dictator of the state. The new Governor was Long’s childhood friend and puppet, and this allowed Long to continue shaping policy in the state, which was then—as it remains today—one of the poorest in the nation.

In the worst days of the Depression, Long built a national profile based on his high popularity among the poorest people—first in his own state, then across the country. His consistent critique of extreme inequality and wealth concentration, which he blamed directly for people’s suffering, resonated deeply with many Americans. He singled out oil companies like Standard and Shell, as well as plutocrats like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Mellon. His political platform, “Share Our Wealth,” was for its day a radical redistribution program that demanded a cap on excessive wealth and a subsidy to every American household, including the guarantee of housing, a car, and a radio so that “none shall be too big, none shall be too small.”

Of course, the main reason for Long’s popularity was that he didn’t just talk but got things done. Long’s biographer, Harry T. Williams, mentions that prior to Long’s election as Governor in 1928, Louisiana had only 296 miles of concrete road, thirty-five miles of asphalt, 5,728 miles of gravel, and three major bridges, none of which crossed the Mississippi River. By 1935, when Long was assassinated, the state had 2,446 miles of concrete roads, 1,308 miles of asphalt, 9,629 miles of gravel, and more than forty major bridges.

Whereas the people of Louisiana, and poor people across the country, saw in Long a champion and protector, the elites of his day—business tycoons, editors in New York, professors at Harvard and Yale—feared and despised him. He was widely seen at the time as a fascist-like figure, while others regarded him as a sort of communist. Whatever political flavor one wants to assign to Long, it is fair to call him an authoritarian. He consistently showed contempt for democratic institutions, and in the climate of the 1930s, this immediately evoked thoughts of Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed, many people who barely listened to the content of Long’s speeches could not get past his body language and mannerisms, which to many mattered much more than the substance of his speeches. Much of what Long had to say was not entirely exact or necessarily realistic, but he touched on a real problem in American society that many people could identify with: the combination of wealth concentration and extreme inequality. Politicians who highlight this problem today are, unsurprisingly, in the similar position of being admired by large numbers of people and reviled by the elite.

FDR understood what made Long popular, and he responded accordingly. In his first two terms, FDR enjoyed a widespread national popularity that has never been matched by any President since. In particular, the “New Deal”—FDR’s flurry of policies unleashed during the first 100 days of his administration—attempted to stimulate the moribund American economy without concern for “procedure.” A lot of its measures weren’t even about economic growth, or even “the economy,” in the way that modern economists understand the term. Rather, the New Deal was about protections and the restoration of basic social fabrics that economic collapse destroyed. Arguably the two most notable features of the New Deal were the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act (concerning the minimum wage), which helped poor people in particular and which FDR’s enemies on the right most despised. But the most important feature of the New Deal was, of course, putting people to work so that they could be paid something, even if the jobs were as “meaningless” as cutting rocks in a yard all day. The result of FDR’s policies was a roughly functional society—less susceptible to fascism or revolution, founded on material progress, social protections, and major public infrastructure projects. No such analog exists in the present.

The New Deal built a powerful coalition of voters that seems unthinkable today, bound by policies that promoted the public good and consisted of ethnic minorities, white farmers, African Americans (who because of the New Deal began, for the first time, to abandon the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln), industrial workers, and intellectuals. FDR knew exactly what was happening in the wider world, understood what severe economic crisis did to people and their politics, and recognized what he was up against. He seemed to share a class-based analysis of the problems facing the American people, and when he said, “we have earned the hatred of entrenched greed,” he was not wrong. What helped him potentially fend off any serious challenge from Long (who may have run in 1936 had he not been shot) and other challengers was that he was beloved by poor people across racial, ethnic, and other lines—the same people who also supported Long. Given FDR’s own privileged background, many of his fellow elites considered him a class traitor.

Even policies that carried mostly symbolic meaning endeared him to his supporters. The Revenue Act of 1935 raised federal income tax by introducing the “Wealth Tax,” a progressive tax that took up to 75% of the highest incomes and which led to the greatest period of growth in American history. Additionally, in 1935, in a mischievous act of populism, FDR proposed the wonderfully-named “Soak the Rich” bill to effectively tax one person—Rockefeller. “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made,” he would later say. Such policies would be immediately killed in America’s donor-driven politics today.

But perhaps the most “authoritarian” move proposed by FDR was the so-called “court packing plan” of 1937. When the conservative Supreme Court threatened to overturn the New Deal as “unconstitutional” (specifically, and not surprisingly, the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, the programs that most helped the poorest Americans), the President announced his plan to add enough new Justices for each sitting Justice who did not retire by age seventy, until there were fifteen instead of nine.

The plan never went through, partly because FDR met resistance from his own Party in Congress, but mainly because the Supreme Court changed its mind by declaring that, actually, the New Deal was constitutional. Indeed, FDR’s move was not only perfectly legal and within the President’s mandate, but also necessary given what Americans were living through at the time. This was clearly an attempt by FDR to bully the Supreme Court, which is a bedrock of the checks-and-balances on which American democracy rests. In threatening the Supreme Court, was FDR being authoritarian? Or was he being democratic?

The answer is: both. He was being authoritarian, but his goal was to protect democracy. FDR understood something fundamental that few liberal elites nowadays do, namely, that a democracy needs to take care of people’s basic needs if they are to remain committed to the system. Simply, for FDR, feeding starving people was more important than a commitment to an institution.

Saving Democracy

In an era of rising authoritarianism meant to destroy democracy, FDR knew that a certain degree of authoritarianism was necessary to protect democracy, since it couldn’t just save itself. He understood why people choose authoritarianism. It wasn’t because of “disinformation,” as many of our elites like to say today. “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations,” FDR said in an April 1938 fireside chat, “not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they stay helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness through lack of leadership. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.” The liberal and neoliberal elites of today, who have all but abandoned FDR’s legacy at the behest of corporate interests, would do well—if they are serious about saving democracy, as they claim—to pay heed to the words of the Democratic Party’s most successful leader. FDR’s response to the challenges that threatened to bring about the rise of fascism (or alternately, a socialist revolution of some sort) in the 1930s was the complete antithesis to what we have seen in the years since the financial crisis of 2008–2009.

In the past thirty years, the top 1% in America have added $21 trillion to their wealth, while the bottom 50% has lost $900 billion. We know from history (and specifically the history of FDR’s era) that democracy cannot survive in such conditions. The powers that be will need to resort to increasing authoritarianism and propaganda just to maintain power and legitimacy. But even an authoritarian regime, in the long term, cannot survive such conditions. Eventually, a revolutionary moment will arrive, as the ancién regime in France learned the hard way in 1789. We also know from the 1930s that when center-right or center-left elites spend their energy and dwindling public credibility fighting tooth and nail against alternative politics or economic policies deemed too “radical,” a populist form of rightwing politics eventually swoops in and exploits public disgruntlement. This is very much the case in our era and was certainly true in Europe in the 1930s.

This toxic dynamic is primarily why American political life currently consists of a strange mix of democracy and authoritarianism. We know that American democracy is an incomplete, unfinished, and deeply flawed project, but it has been especially degraded in the last five decades. This deterioration was not the product of foreign pressures or influence, but totally self-inflicted. A politics in which a handful of multi-billionaires dictate not only central policy but also what the future should look like for everyone—through the sheer weight of their ability to legally corrupt politicians and institutions—is much closer to oligarchy than to democracy.

One lesson we can take from FDR’s case is that, in a severe crisis, many people will not necessarily turn to a democratic leader or to an authoritarian leader. That is a false choice. They will, more likely, turn to leaders who confront the crisis and propose both an explanation and a solution. Some leaders will propose a truthful explanation for the crisis and their solutions will focus on the common good. Other, more dangerous leaders will address real problems and will propose false explanations and solutions that scapegoat, deflect, and distract from the real causes of people’s suffering. This is what fascists did then, and it is what their political and spiritual heirs do now, in the United States and elsewhere.

Historically, the most effective barrier against these figures is a sort of compromise: a leader committed to the public good even if it is at the expense of a commitment to proceduralism, existing institutions, and elite arrangements. It is a compromise between democracy and a certain kind of authoritarianism that we need today, in an era of rising authoritarianism—the kind of compromise represented, in the 1930s, by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Emidio Lev Rahmani is the nom de plume of Francesco Di Bella, a researcher at Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (CeSPI) in Italy. He writes on issues related to the political and social dynamics of the SWANA region, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Palestine.

The disarmament of armed non-state actors has long been one of the most complex challenges in post-conflict transitions. The core issue rarely lies solely in the weapons themselves, but rather in what those weapons represent—whether it be legitimacy, deterrence, or identity. This means that disarmament is not merely a technical process of demobilization but also a political act that redefines power relationships and national sovereignty. The contemporary debate surrounding Hamas and Hezbollah illustrates how deeply this issue is intertwined with questions of trust, representation, and security, since—in both Gaza and Lebanon—the presence of powerful and politically integrated militias challenges the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Yet outright attempts to dismantle these structures often face a “commitment problem,” which is the inability of parties to both credibly promise and fulfil future obligations.

The commitment problem arises when parties involved in a conflict have rational incentives to break promises once circumstances change. This creates a structural issue, particularly in asymmetric conflicts where one actor holds overwhelming military power, while the other relies on legitimacy derived from resistance. Israel’s approach to Hamas exemplifies this logic. From an Israeli perspective, any acceptance of a non-disarmed Hamas risks future attacks once the group rebuilds strength. For Hamas, however, complete disarmament would eliminate the sole Palestinian deterrent against Israeli military dominance. With both sides facing incentives to defect, the prospect of stable peace becomes increasingly fragile. A similar dilemma faces Hezbollah in Lebanon, which, after decades of conflict with Israel and deep integration into Lebanese politics and society, considers its armed wing not as a temporary tool but as an essential part of its identity and survival. It therefore views any disarmament attempt, whether through domestic legislation or international pressure, as an existential threat to its legitimacy. The result is a classic deadlock: the state cannot credibly guarantee Hezbollah’s security, and Hezbollah cannot credibly assure it will refrain from using force.

This dynamic is not unique to the Middle East. The histories of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in the Basque Country offer strong lessons on how credible commitments to resolving entrenched conflict can develop only through gradual integration, verified trust-building, and the establishment of parallel political institutions capable of reining in the continued use of armed force. Recognizing these precedents is essential for creating a practical route toward disarmament in both Gaza and Lebanon.

The Good Friday Agreement and the Basque Disarmament Model

The Northern Ireland peace process provides a key example of how the commitment problem can be addressed through gradualism, verification, guarantees, and inclusion. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement did not require the immediate disarmament of the IRA, but instead established a political and institutional framework in which disarmament became both credible and, eventually, in the organization’s own interest. The IRA’s armed campaign was justified by a perceived lack of political representation for the Catholic and nationalist communities. In response, the Good Friday Agreement aimed to address this structural imbalance by establishing a power-sharing executive, cross-border institutions with the Republic of Ireland, and eventually a Bill of Rights to ensure representation.

Only after these institutions became established—and as the IRA observed tangible political gains through Sinn Féin’s participation—did the conditions for voluntary disarmament mature. Even then, disarmament remained incremental and opaque: from 2001 to 2005, the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) oversaw the disposal of weapons under strict confidentiality and, crucially, the process was not externally imposed but negotiated through domestic consensus and international facilitation, especially by the United States and Canada. This sequenced approach transformed weapons from symbols of legitimacy into liabilities that hindered Sinn Féin’s full political normalization, illustrating that gradualism alone does not guarantee success; disarmament can only follow genuine political integration. Without the institutional and psychological transformation that made the IRA’s arms redundant, any externally imposed demand for immediate disarmament would have inevitably failed.

The Basque case shows a similar pattern of delayed, yet internally motivated, demilitarization. The Spanish state never engaged in direct negotiations with ETA, which officially renounced violence only in 2011 after more than four decades of armed conflict. However, ETA’s decision was not entirely unilateral: it resulted from increasing political inclusion and civil society mobilization. Key to the process was the emergence of a new and legitimate political space for the ezker abertzale (“patriotic left” in Euskara), formerly represented by ETA’s political wing, Batasuna, which was banned in 2003. As left-wing parties such as Sortu and Aralar distanced themselves from ETA’s violence, they gradually gained legal recognition and formed a coalition called Euskal Herria Bildu.

Similarly, civil organizations like Elkarri and Lokarri promoted social dialogues that redefined disarmament not as defeat, but as moral and civic maturity. Therefore, when ETA ultimately surrendered its weapons in 2017—under the supervision of the International Verification Commission (IVC)—it did so not due to coercion, but because the group’s political project had found a new outlet within democratic institutions. The Spanish and French governments set firm conditions, but the true impetus came from within Basque society—a shift in legitimacy that rendered armed struggle obsolete. As in Northern Ireland, disarmament only had meaning because it followed (not preceded) political normalization. The broader lesson is that coercive disarmament, without concurrent processes of inclusion and institutional legitimacy, tends to reinforce resistance rather than eliminate it.

The Problem in Lebanon and Palestine

Hezbollah’s disarmament debate reveals a similar kind of structural commitment problem to the ones raised above. In the aftermath of Hezbollah’s 2024 conflict with Israel, the organization’s military strength was greatly diminished; international mediation resulted in an agreement to move heavy weapons north of the Litani and to allow oversight by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). But Hezbollah’s subsequent rhetorical and practical retreat showed that formal clauses cannot substitute for the deeper political and institutional conditions necessary for credible compliance. The Lebanese state’s own vulnerabilities (confessional fragmentation, an underfunded and politically limited LAF, a social contract that has long tolerated parallel providers of security and welfare) mean that any disarmament demand is immediately judged against whether the state can replace both Hezbollah’s deterrent role and its social services. Simply put, Hezbollah’s resistance to unilateral or coercive disarmament reflects not only a strategic calculation about military advantage but also a perceived threat to organizational legitimacy and community representation.

The Palestinian situation in Gaza highlights the same commitment dilemma in a different context. Israel fears that a formally undeclared disbandment of Hamas could allow it to regain its capabilities and restart cross-border attacks, while Hamas, in turn, worries that disarmament would make it vulnerable to coercive measures and political marginalization. The importance of the tunnel networks in Gaza—both materially and symbolically—intensifies these fears: tunnels serve as tactical assets, means of governance and supply, powerful bargaining tools, and as instruments for maintaining clandestine mobility under pressure. As such, their immediate removal without credible guarantees against subsequent Israeli coercion or punitive occupation is unlikely to ensure long-term security. Conversely, demanding total, immediate disarmament risks creating a governance vacuum in Gaza, which could lead to social breakdown and the resurgence of armed groups that are essentially the same as the original organization.

Lebanon and Gaza both face a straightforward political calculation: weapons serve both as military tools and as symbols of political power, so trying to disarm them while ignoring the political dimension is unlikely to succeed. Historical examples like the IRA and ETA show that arms only lose their perceived necessity when the political environment is changed so that legitimate goals can be pursued without violence. In Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, disarmament happened as a result of gradually including groups in the political process that established institutional guarantees and socially delegitimized violence, not as a prerequisite for starting talks. This highlights the main flaw in current approaches to disarmament in Lebanon and Gaza: outside actors, like the United States in Lebanon through the diplomatic initiative led by Thomas Barrack, often insist on disarmament before negotiations. Such approaches fail to address key obstacles such as Israel’s belligerent insistence on maintaining total asymmetric dominance. History indicates that negotiations and political inclusion should come first for disarmament to be believable. Translating these lessons into practical prescriptions for Gaza and Lebanon involves prioritizing processes over declarations.

For Gaza, the immediate focus ought not to be a doctrinaire demand for total demilitarization, but a carefully staged program of arms reduction through transparency and verification, linked to governance reforms and strong international guarantees. This process can only be credible if it acknowledges and addresses the context of profound hostility generated by the highly asymmetric security environment that Israel staunchly preserves. Eliminating the tunnel system should be regarded as a non-negotiable security measure because, even though tunnels have played an essential strategic role for Hamas against Israel’s on-the-ground genocidal policies, they are uniquely destabilizing—defeating conventional surveillance and embodying a subterranean capacity that is exceptionally difficult to monitor. Nonetheless, this measure should not be framed as a precondition for engagement, but as a component of a phased and gradual process in which both sides undertake steps to address existing power asymmetries. In this sequence, allowing Hamas to keep a limited, clearly defined surface arsenal, observable to external monitors and periodically verifiable, would reduce the group’s incentive to see disarmament as an existential surrender and would lower Israel’s motivation to pursue preemptive annihilation. This measured approach turns weapons from irreducible assets into politically manageable elements within a transition process.

In Lebanon, a comparable strategy would be an integration pathway that gradually incorporates Hezbollah’s military and social capacities into state institutions—in other words, a credible approach recognizing that Hezbollah’s arms are intertwined with its domestic legitimacy and perceptions of state failure. A realistic roadmap thus begins with strengthening the institutional capacity of the LAF and a program to absorb, retrain, and redeploy selected Hezbollah personnel and technical assets into national structures under transparent civilian oversight. Additionally, parallel efforts should redirect Hezbollah’s welfare networks into public service frameworks to avoid creating a social vacuum that could provoke backlash or revive parallel governance. Importantly, any such program requires strong international guarantees—both economic incentives and security assurances—that effectively reduce the perceived benefits of armed autonomy while safeguarding vulnerable communities during the transition.

Across both theaters, verification and third-party guarantees are essential because they significantly influence the calculus of commitments; neutral, globally respected monitors do not merely record compliance, but also shape expectations of future behavior. Where credible, persistent monitoring exists, the incentive to break commitments is diminished because violations become detectable and politically costly. The IICD in Northern Ireland and the IVC in the Basque case succeeded not because they were punitive but because they were integrated into a political framework that made compliance rational for the armed actors. This suggests that without carefully designed, technically capable, and politically accepted institutions, any pledge to disarm remains an empty unilateral gesture.

This is not to romanticize gradualism, nor to understate the political challenges ahead. In Israel and among many of its supporters, any proposal permitting an armed Hamas or a partially armed Hezbollah would be politically damaging, while in Lebanon, domestic actors worry that external pressure to disarm could spark instability or be exploited by regional rivals. Yet history indicates that insisting on immediate, unconditional disarmament as a precondition for political normalization is a dead end, encouraging both the state and the armed non-state actor to see arms as the ultimate safeguard of their survival. A more politically prudent strategy recognizes that disarmament is a process of political replacement and a trade-off in which weapons are made irrelevant not solely through force but by creating alternative, legitimate avenues for representation, security, and welfare.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The journey toward disarmament in Gaza and in Lebanon cannot simply imitate European experiences, since the sociopolitical contexts of Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Palestine, and Lebanon vary significantly. Still, the core principles of credible commitment and gradual trust-building remain universally applicable. External pressure and conditional aid, like current U.S. policy toward Lebanon, may speed up negotiations but cannot replace internal political ownership. Hezbollah’s integration into the Lebanese state will demand not surrender but transformation through a redefinition of its role from an autonomous resistance group to an institutional stakeholder (which it already is in many respects). Similarly, Hamas’s path to normalization must include a phased arms-control process recognizing its embeddedness within Palestinian governance structures in Gaza.

The key lesson from the IRA and ETA cases is that violence ends not when weapons vanish, but when their political usefulness disappears, and this change requires inclusive governance, socioeconomic stabilization, and credible guarantees—conditions that cannot be imposed from outside but must be developed from within. Disarmament in these cases is less about removing weapons and more about redefining legitimacy. In Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, legitimacy shifted from the battlefield to the ballot box through negotiated power-sharing and social consensus. In Lebanon and Gaza, by contrast, the dynamics are far more complex, since the challenge is less about integration into a domestic political system but rather the near-total lack of workable political processes with Israel. The lesson of history is that armed movements do not disarm because they are defeated, but because the political system makes their arms obsolete. Until states like Israel and Lebanon can credibly commit to long-term political and security guarantees, and until movements like Hamas and Hezbollah can trust that disarmament will not mean their destruction and, ultimately, giving up the defense of their homelands and people, the weapons will stay. Bridging this trust gap is essential for any lasting peace.

It felt like a quiet form of poetic justice: the death of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney—chief architect of the 2003 Iraq War, “enhanced interrogation” (torture) policies, and the post-9/11 security state—coincided with the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City.

Zohran is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, the famed academic and critic of U.S. imperialism, who has spent decades exposing the narratives that justified wars like Cheney’s. That his son rose to power on the very day Cheney’s era effectively ended felt like history correcting course.

North American news outlets have responded to Cheney’s death with sanitizing language by characterizing his bloody legacy as “remarkable” and “controversial.” Yet it is impossible to forget that he spearheaded one of the most disastrous U.S. foreign policy blunders of the last century, culminating in the deaths of at least half a million Iraqis.

The trillion-dollar U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was launched on the false premise that Saddam Hussein was harboring nuclear weapons (of course, none were ever found). It was a war that gave rise to Daesh, or the Islamic State (ISIS), and one that sanctioned waterboarding—a CIA interrogation method that simulates the experience of drowning—as an “acceptable” form of torture. “I’d do it again in a minute,” Cheney said about waterboarding during a Meet the Press interview in 2014. Notably, there was and still is no evidence that the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques produced reliable intelligence or prevented any terrorist attacks.

And yet, Cheney’s influence didn’t end with the Iraq War. His company, Halliburton, which he led before becoming vice president, went on to win billions in no-bid government contracts for reconstruction and oil-field services in Iraq. The arrangement exposed how the war blurred the line between public duty and private profit.

Keeping figures like Cheney in our collective memory is critical, but not merely to relitigate the past. Remembering his horrific legacy is about recognizing how the political narratives about “security” and “terrorism” he helped create have traveled across borders and become normal features of policy and public discourse without our noticing. If, for example, Canadians fail to acknowledge the origins of certain security instincts, we risk assuming they are “naturally Canadian,” rather than ideas imported from a particular era and ideology.

One of the biggest misconceptions about our foreign policy independence post-Iraq is that, because Canada didn’t officially go to war in Iraq under then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, we are somehow cleaner or less entangled in the violence inflicted upon others. Yet through the Kandahar combat mission, civilian casualties, PTSD legacies, and the Afghan detainee scandal, including government secrecy about detainee abuse, Canadian policy echoed the same geopolitical moment Cheney helped define. Ottawa’s decisions were shaped by fear, militarism, and deeply entrenched notions of an “us versus them” politics built on lies.

That history makes Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City’s new mayor all the more profound. His victory is more than political; it is symbolic of a complete shift in worldview.

Where his father gave voice and dignity to Muslims navigating suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11, Zohran now embodies that legacy. There is a reason why his campaign, which centered on challenging oligarchs and affordable housing, resonated with millions across New York City and the world. In a climate shaped by the policies and paranoia of Cheney’s era, Mamdani’s win is proof that leaders with integrity can rise to power, and that a different politics is not only imaginable, it is arriving.

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William Barylo joins Protean View to discuss his new book, Muslims in the Neoliberal Empire: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era (Oxford, 2025).

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Zaid Adhami joins Protean View to discuss his new book, Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith (UNC Press, 2025).

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Christoph Schuringa joins Protean View to discuss his new book, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy (Verso, 2025).

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If I were to walk into any major Western museum, or perhaps any major museum in the world built with Western patrons in mind, I would not be struck to find a section dedicated to Islamic art. I would likely gravitate to it before, say, the Greco-Roman section, and would expect to see ancient Qur’anic manuscripts, jewels meant for Mughal royalty, and other relics over which to marvel. What I probably would not do as I peruse these priceless fragments of history, however, is wonder why they are displayed together.

It isn’t uncommon to find Qur’anic manuscripts, Andalusian ceramics decorated with Qur’anic verses, or beautified prayer rugs grouped together in an Islamic art exhibition: all these objects are either explicitly or implicitly “religious,” and their “Islamic purpose” is presumably clear. But what we often also come across are devotional objects like Qur’anic fragments displayed alongside more “functional” ones—like apparel, paintings, photographs, and textiles—with no obvious “Islamic purpose,” all presented under the banner of being “Islamic.” This may seem peculiar, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all uncommon. Visitors to Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace Museum, for example, can find precisely that sort of arrangement. How should we understand the implications of bringing such diverse objects together under the label “Islamic”? What kind of narrative is being constructed when such varied objects are grouped together under the same religious and cultural marker?

Islamic art often lacks clear classification, and the way art galleries treat it reflects that fact. One gallery may see no issue with jewelry placed next to the Qur’an; another may deem the jewelry “not Islamic enough.” No such issue seems to follow other art forms—we generally have no trouble distinguishing cubist art from that which is “of the Renaissance,” for example. Yet for many of us, the reed flute player, with no accompanying devotional singing, might be as good an example of “Islamic art” as a tile of calligraphy from a Mamluk-era mosque. This reflects a common attitude many of us hold about Islamic art, both inside and beyond art exhibitions, museums, and galleries.

Whether such a perception of Islamic art precedes the work of modern curators is for another essay, but the fact that it exists at all suggests that Islamic art curation proceeds in a largely unscrutinized manner across continents. What both the museum and its visitors seem to be doing is collapsing all artwork made by Muslims (or in Muslim societies) into a single category based on one measure: the proximity of that art to the premodern past. For this reason, while ceramics placed next to the Qur’an might not surprise us, we likely would be surprised to see an abstract painting by a living Indonesian artist placed next to a vase with Qur’anic calligraphy from a living Iranian craftsman.

Art institutions are as confused about what constitutes Islamic art as we are. Take Sotheby’s, the British-founded auction house as an example. In overviewing their Islamic art department, they describe it as:

…a spectrum of classical arts from the Middle East and wider Islamic World, featuring a range of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as miniatures, paintings, ceramics, metalwork, arms and armour, glass, jewellery and many other fine decorative objects.

Interestingly, by using terms like “classical” and “Middle East” (which, notably, arrive before the word “Islamic”), this brief description channels the familiar temporal and geographic tropes that have come to constitute our imagination of Islamic art. The description shows no concern for separating between the devotional, functional, or purely decorative aspects of Islamic art; “manuscripts” rest right alongside “arms” and “jewellery.” Later, we encounter the following:

Sotheby’s has been entrusted with the most important private collections of Islamic and Indian art since the inception of the auction category on the market.

Rather abruptly, “Indian art” is now thrust into their classification alongside “Islamic,” with no mention of it in the previous section. It is unclear if they mean that Indian art is Islamic art, or why it has been singled out in this section. What is clear, however, is that modern perceptions of “Islamic art” have very little (if anything) to do with theological iconography or thought. The art industry is unconcerned with Islam as a worldview from which ideas about beauty, theology, and metaphysics emanate; the typically orientalist aesthetics associated with Islam are apparently sufficient to deem something “Islamic.” The terms are not set by Muslims.

It almost seems like there is no way to make Islamic art today, unless it is something explicitly devotional or a replication of the styles you might find at Sotheby’s. As beautiful as those works may be, this conundrum means that contemporary glasswork, jewelry, or poetry that happen to be made by Muslims may not be considered “Islamic.” What they will be considered, more often, is a type of outsider art in which the artist’s “Muslimness” may be referenced in promotional materials. Art made by Muslims in our current time is often seen through the incomplete lens of Islam as a kind of counter-culture and/or ethnic eccentricity—no different to any other identity group under liberalism’s totalizing umbrella.

For much of their history, Muslim societies did not deem the functional or the decorative as realms outside of the sacred. Strict distinctions between the sacred and the profane are arguably alien to the Islamic tradition. Both the prayer mat and the necklace could potentially carry sacred meaning because they were often crafted with what Sherman Jackson calls the “Divine gaze” in mind. Oddly, however, modern uses of the term “Islamic” sometimes have the effect of taking that sacred potential away by reifying a labored distinction between the sacred and the profane. This distinction is further reinforced when artists (Muslim or otherwise) buy into the idea that devotion to God exists only on the prayer mat or in the Mosque walls. Yet if we believe that art is properly “Islamic” only if it is from an ancient time, from faraway or forgone places, or consists in the “explicitly” religious (however that is defined), we will perpetuate the false notion that our cooking, painting, and writing are “worldly” productions which consist in no sacredness.

One has to therefore question the usefulness of “Islamic” as a descriptor. In the Islamic tradition, “Islamic” is a fairly recent lexical addition. Things like “Islamic” dress, “Islamic” food, and other such phrases would be out of place in classical legal texts. And while both dress and food have legal boundaries and are addressed by classical and modern jurists alike, it was generally understood that the particular form of what believers wear or eat would naturally differ across geographies. This is a far cry from something like “Islamic dress” referring to a white khalījī tunic, or “Islamic food” meaning biryani and mutton pilau. So, the term becomes what Muslims happen to be doing somewhat en-masse (which could very well be anything). Islamic art in particular, like Islam more broadly, cannot be limited to “devotional” expressions or attempts at recreating an already contested past. A fully “authentic” Muslim cultural production demands the emergence of a third way in which the artist can use contemporary tools and trends (be they in poetry, textiles, or any other art form) to make work that is beautiful both with and without explicit devotional elements or cultural motifs particular to the “old Islamicate.”

If we leave the term “Islamic” as it is, we risk accepting the assumptions it sits on, namely, that “proper” Islamic art is the domain of the past and a few select geographies. What becomes of the contemporary Senegalese tailor or the American poet, Muslim though they might be? Arguably better is to allow the Muslim tailor—their worldview no less Islamic than the Qur’anic calligrapher—to be seen as equally authentic. This will require a rethinking of what constitutes the “Islamic,” and one way to do this is to treat Islam itself, per Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, as a “colorless water” that takes on the culture of the place to which it meanders. The idea here is that Islam looks Nigerian in Nigeria, and Chinese in China. This metaphor might support a more flexible approach to artistic expression that is authentically “Islamic,” though not without some limitations.

What, for example, does Islam look like in the Western metropole? How does Islam “take on” the culture of the Western cities in which it finds itself, and what impact does that have on artistic expression? Islamic forms of life in a Western city, where the parents of most of the community were born in the Muslim world, potentially complicate Abd-Allah's theory about Islam as a “colorless water.” If we add the religious (and then cultural) influence of modern Saudi Arabia, globalization, Islamophobia, and social media into the mix, an “authentic” expression of Islam in the West—artistic or otherwise—isn’t as neat as simply being British in Britain and French in France. Rather than naturally adapting to its environment, Islam in the West often navigates multiple, sometimes competing pressures, including inherited traditionalism, imposed stereotypes, and reactive identity politics. Yet how we think about Islam’s place in the West matters if only because art’s seat of industrial power sits there, and ideas about what is “Islamic”—born within a Western cultural milieu—can (and often are) easily exported to much of the Muslim world. Institutional and market forces shape global art standards (including “Islamic” ones), and often, those standards are Western.

Perhaps this will strike some as a Western-centric concern. After all, why does it matter what a few million Muslims in London or Brussels are doing, and of what importance is this to the Muslim world at large? I would argue that, when it comes to art, what we often find in Cairo, Karachi, or Beirut is not meaningfully different from what is exhibited in London or New York, especially in terms of underlying curation philosophies. Perhaps more importantly, the arts are becoming as globalized as any other industry, as is apparent in funding patterns, organizational structures, and their flattening impact on taste. Indeed, the themes of institutional art are becoming common across national and continental lines. And as this occurs, there seems to be little interest in Muslim art that exists as an extension of tradition, or which is confident in itself without needing to reference its “otherness.”

What the Muslim artist should realize is that their “difference” does not need to be used solely as a point of analysis with regard to social marginalization and racial subjugation; it can also be a site of deeper reflection on the erosion of their intellectual and spiritual history, as well as what their tradition has to say when it comes to beauty, aesthetics, and art itself. Western art institutions may be uninterested in these reflections for now, but they are worth considering to inform a more confident Muslim artistic community that is as well versed in their context and worldview, including their potential points of tension or contradiction. These sites of contradiction can produce new, thoughtful work that moves beyond both a banal subversiveness of using Islam as a purely political identity, or a nostalgia (shared with orientalists) seeking what Tim Winter calls “our greatly missed dead.”

We therefore cannot ignore the role of commerce in the analysis of Islamic art as an industry. Under capitalism, art operates within an industrial framework, in which corporations, funds, and trusts patronize the work we see in galleries and the pages of our books. Under this paradigm, for an artist to survive they must respond to the cues sent out by these corporations downstream to the gallery. However, it isn’t just that the starving artist is magnetized by the allure of being en vogue. In fact, the art world is full to the brim with the already well-off, who may not be saying the same things as everyone else to put bread on the table, but to stay relevant within circles from which they procure their sense of self—circles whose concerns are quite often wildly out of touch with the people they might claim to represent. The corporate structures around art can lead to situations that would be comical if they weren’t so tragic, like British Petroleum (of all companies) sponsoring an exhibition of artefacts from modern Iraq. This kind of paradoxical relationship is baked into the structures that support art from the outset, and it will continue so long as the funding models remain as they are. Considering these facts, how “Islamic” is Islamic art when funded by forces that are murderous at worst and antagonistic at best?

Imagining the world of art outside of commerciality is a gargantuan task, but it is still something worth pursuing. To build a new model of art shielded from the tentacles of corporatism, secularity, and marginalization, we will need to ask and attempt to answer difficult questions about its public access, hierarchy structures, and the livelihoods of artists themselves. For example, what does an endowment for the arts look like in the age of crowdfunding, and how might an artist produce work freely under the weighty pressure of material need without compromise? These questions need to be wrestled with whether the art is Islamic or not. If the terms, descriptors, and trends are set by global capital, the Muslim artist, without competing structures of their own, will find no avenue for authentic expression. For the most part, the gravitational pull of the artistic industrial complex is as strong in New York as it is in Istanbul. One needn’t read the history of the gallery and the museum to know that they are unlikely to be changed from within, and so the task becomes one of experimentation and world-building that attempts—as best as one can—to produce new methods, networks, and institutions.

Onward looks backward. The apparent contradiction was immediately flagged by critics upon the film’s release a little more than five years ago. National Review called the animated feature “so reactionary it cries out for a return of the Latin Mass,” while Vulture dismissed the film as a Pixar offering that “even the ‘Make America Great Again’ crowd can embrace.”

Onward is reactionary, sure, but it’s hardly conservative (always an easy conflation), and neither epithet does right by the film’s strange topicality. This suburban fantasy is easily Pixar’s most overtly political film since WALL-E in 2008, and possibly Pixar’s most zeitgeisty film ever. That this is not obvious might be credited to the film’s unfortunate release date of March 6, 2020. Any chances Onward might have had at cultural legacy (and the box office) were summarily torpedoed by COVID-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic exactly five days after its premiere; another five days, and the world was locked down. The show did not go on(ward).

It is only right that Onward’s commercial and cultural fate should be so intertwined with the crisis that inaugurated the current decade, given how totally and uncannily it is a film about the 2020s. Onward clearly comes from and belongs to a world in which the 59-year-old governor of Minnesota and U.S. vice-presidential candidate accuses his political opponent of being “a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy” and slams Donald Trump for “cosplaying” as a McDonald’s worker. This is the language of nerds and the Terminally Online cannibalizing mainstream political culture, and that is one of the major stories of our own roaring ‘20s.

The accusation of cosplay—that is, of “LARPing,” short for “Live-Action Roleplay”—has become a rhetorical staple of online discourse, where users bearing anonymous names “act” in a purely symbolic world of texts and images unlinked from the “real world.” The accusation of LARP gets at the widely-felt sense that online existence is either inherently performative or tends to performance, and is therefore in some deep sense inauthentic (never mind impotent).

The availability of “LARPing” as a term of denigration is proportional to the mass of digital denizens who feel that their performative online selves are in fact realer and truer than the physical bodies they inhabit in “meatspace.” For such users, it is the face they show to “IRL society” which is the mask, the LARP, the inauthentic performance of normalcy. Online, behind their profile pictures of frogs or sculptures or cute anime girls, is where others can finally see them as they see themselves.

Onward is a Pixar film about elves and brotherhood, but it is more accurately about the LARPing ‘20s. In just under 100 minutes, it manages to suggest the rather involute thesis that ours is the age of LARP because it is the age of Nietzschean hyperreality. This is a suggestion made only partially and semi-intentionally, but it is made all the same. Our aim here is to unfurl the semiotic process by which this idea emerges. In doing so, we will discover that LARP, much like Nietzsche’s God, is already dead—we just haven’t realized it yet.

ACT I. “I USED TO BE DANGEROUS AND WILD”

Onward is set in a post-magical world of myth, where centaurs drive cars, sprites ride motorcycles, and elves watch workout videos in their suburban homes. Our protagonist, a timid elf named Ian Lightfoot, sets off into the great unknown with his swashbuckling brother, Barley, to secure the “Phoenix Gem” that would allow them to spend a day with their deceased father, Wilden Lightfoot. In the process, Ian is reborn as an elf who, like his father and brother, is unafraid of traversing paths that don’t yet exist.1

There is an undeniable anti-modernism to Onward’s story. “Long ago,” we’re told in the prologue, “the world was full of wonder.” It was “adventurous,” it was “exciting,” and “best of all: there was magic.” Only an elect few ever attained the ability to wield it, though, and so society eventually developed a more democratic method of problem-solving: technology. Why struggle with an esoteric spell when you can flick on a light bulb? Technology gradually displaced magic, until practically all had forgotten how to use it. Thus the anachronistic sight of fairies riding airplanes, gnomes snuggling by an electric fireplace, and mermaids sipping soft drinks while relaxing in plastic blow-up pools. This blunt juxtaposition of the extraordinary and the prosaic powers the film’s comedy and underlines its thematic argument. This is Onward’s conceit: depicting the disenchantment of the world through enchanted creatures.

Onward’s premise sets up a fable with an ethical message as simple as it is heavy-handed: abandoning “magic” for technology has won us material convenience at the expense of spiritual greatness. The film conveys this sense of civilizational decay with one of its sharper opening images: a unicorn, that quintessential creature of medieval myth, rummaging through the trash on the front lawn of a nondescript suburban household, its alabaster coat caked in filth. This image foreshadows a moral idea to which the film repeatedly returns: despite its surface advancement, this is a world that has reduced and made a mockery of itself.

“Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the start of The Wagner Case, “than the problem of decadence.” For Nietzsche, “decadence” was not merely a synonym for “decline.” Decadence is that which denies life rather than affirms it, enervating individuals and entire cultures alike. Amongst Nietzsche’s most oft-cited decadents were anti-worldly Greeks like Plato, who dismissed material reality and fetishized the “absurdly rational” subjugation of the “lower” bodily appetites. “To have to fight the instincts—this is the formula for decadence,” wrote Nietzsche. Yet the hedonistic pursuit of every pleasureful impulse is also decadent. Any denial of any aspect of life is decadent, and hedonism denies one of life’s most undeniable qualities: suffering. This “longing for bliss” but “dread of pain” sits at the very heart of decadence. “Amor fati”—one should always love one’s fate, no matter its beauty or horror. We overcome decadence only when we greet pleasure and pain with equal enthusiasm.

That Onward’s society is decadent in the Nietzschean sense is indicated by its cultural mediocrity and instinctive hedonism—the former evinced by its loss of history, the latter its unbridled consumerism. The two reinforce and accelerate one another. The city of New Mushroomton retains only a tenuous link to its rich magical past, now seen as the exclusive province of “history buffs” like Barley. Officer Bronco dismisses the ruin at the heart of the city as “an old piece of rubble,” an opinion surely shared by the construction workers who have repeatedly attempted to demolish it. Onwardlinks this historical and cultural impoverishment to the mass consumption that is both the producer and the product of technological convenience. Fast food restaurants like “Fry Fortress” and “Burger Shire” (parodying real-life chains like “White Castle”) trivialize the city’s civilizational heritage by commercializing it, reducing mythological traditions to corporate brands and tawdry products. The Manticore’s Tavern, once a magnet for the adventurous and insane, is now Chuck E. Cheese. Its owner-manager, The Manticore, is a once-mythical beast turned high-strung, high-heels-wearing businesswoman, forced to sell her enchanted sword to get out of tax trouble. The Manticore’s fear of costly litigation, negative online reviews, and angry investors has made her a risk-averse shadow of her former self. Onward suggests, through such pitiful sights as the domesticated Manticore, that capitalist liberalism has devitalized and infantilized modern culture.

For this civilizational sickness, Onward prescribes Nietzsche. The antidote to decadence is the cultivation of our immanent potential, the “magic” latent within. “There’s a mighty warrior inside of you,” Barley tells his brother Ian, our timid protagonist, early in the film. “You just have to let him out.” Nietzsche saw himself as a reviver of pre-Platonic and pre-Christian “warrior ethics,” exalting “courage, greatness, elite excellence” over and against the “pusillanimity” bred by “modern life-affirming humanism,” because the ability to “set life lower than honour and reputation has always been the mark of the warrior, his claim to superiority.”2 The Manticore comes close to reiterating this worldview verbatim when she reminisces about the days her tavern was “filled with a motley horde willing to risk life and limb for the mere taste of excitement.”

Just as The Manticore embodies the decadence of her age, so too does she manifest the film’s Nietzschean vision for overcoming it. Pushed into an existential reckoning by Ian, The Manticore decides to reject enfeebled civility for primal vitality. “I used to be dangerous and wild,” she roars, at once recognizing and recovering the ferocity that she has lost. Even as she says this, one of her employees—costumed as a mawkish mascot of her—mimics the genuine article. Like the cartoonish dragon that is the mascot of New Mushroomton High School, it is a saccharine caricature of a legendary beast and a visual shorthand for cultural devolution. The mascot is a funhouse mirror of The Manticore, a castrated version of herself that she literally sets aflame.

The Manticore proceeds to burn down her tavern, purging her soul of its commercial rot. But she isn’t simply destroying her bar-turned-family-center. She cracks the plaster masking the walls of the stonier and grittier tavern of old, stripping the corporate renovations that had, like mold, obnubilated the original structure. This is her “remodeling”—not the construction of a novel space, but the rehabilitation of an abandoned one.

The Manticore, then, emerges anew by returning to her roots. This is the argument at the heart of Onward: we can only move forward—onward—by advancing backwards. Everyone else in the film, too, must recover their better, bolder selves by progressing to their primordial roots. The sprites must re-learn to fly rather than ride motorcycles, the centaurs to run rather than drive cars, and Ian’s mother, Laurel, to prove that she is a “mighty warrior” by fighting an actual dragon rather than merely following a workout routine on television.

This is what “magic” truly signifies in the movie: an entire cultural outlook that trumpets self-reliance, courage, and strength over dependency, cowardice, and weakness. This is why Ian’s father, the reformer who sought to restore magic to his post-magic society, is described above all as “bold,” and why Ian, to successfully revive his father, must also become bold. Magic is boldness. To be magical is to be Nietzschean; to be otherwise is to be modern.

Modern civilization, by frantically shielding us from peril, keeps us in perpetual adolescence, forever immature. “I'm not ready!” Ian screams as he tries to merge into speeding highway traffic. “You’ll never be ready!” Barley shoots back, forcing Ian’s hand, and suddenly he’s navigating a high-speed car chase with nary an error. Similarly, once the sprites lose their motorcycles and are faced with an impending splat against the pavement, they discover that they can, in fact, fly. Only in times of extremes do we realize our potential. “I needed that rope!” Ian shouts at Barley, after crossing over a bottomless pit while bolstered by the false belief that he had a rope around his waist to catch him if he fell. “Oh, but did you?” Barley asks, the smug grin on his face answering the question.

Barley, more than Ian, is the film’s hero because he has neither forgotten his history nor been numbed by modernity’s luxuries. He has somehow escaped society’s programmed preference for convenience—in one especially obvious scene, Barley rejects Ian’s advice to take the speedier expressway in favor of the more taxing “Path of Peril.” Barley is cast as the brave prophet of New Mushroomton, fruitlessly but tirelessly preaching the gospel of magic to a society that has forgotten it. He is unafraid to blaze a path beyond the timorous pieties of modern society, guiding The Last Man (Ian) out of his comfort zone of safe mediocrity.3 Ian’s Last Man-ness is expressed by his refrain whenever faced with the latest mortal danger: “We’re dead, we’re going to die!” He lives petrified of the end, and so he doesn’t really live at all.

Onward, then, appears to straightforwardly celebrate a Nietzschean ethic of “courage, greatness, élite excellence.” This would be the end of our story, were it not for a few niggling wrinkles in the film’s thematic fabric. Attempts to smooth these wrinkles only create more. It doesn’t take much more failed smoothing for Onward’s philosophical tissue to begin showing signs of serious strain.

What if, by Onward’s—and Nietzsche’s—own criteria, Barley the Ubermensch is the most decadent character of all?

ACT II. “BASED ON REAL LIFE”

The Nietzschean idea that we’ve been devitalized by living in a well-ordered, materially abundant, and essentially safe society may go some way to explaining why a subculture of LARP (Live-Action Role-Play) has arisen in recent decades, and almost entirely in well-off countries. LARP gives participants an opportunity to experience a more perilous existence without any of the actual peril. It thus, in a stakes-less manner befitting a civilized people, satisfies the seemingly insatiable human need for fear and terror—an itch that polite society scratches through such diplomatic alternatives as horror films, roller coasters, and bumper cars.

Though LARP has many forms, its first and most popular is that of medieval fantasy. Well-adjusted adults with families and jobs will retreat from civilization for the weekend, donning plastic armor and foam swords to reenact Lord-of-the-Rings-style scenarios of adventure, war, and sacrifice. This style of LARP grew out of the 1970s nerd culture surrounding RPG tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).4

Barley bears more than a passing resemblance to the stereotypical LARPer. He spends his days playing a board game called “Quests of Yore,” an obvious knockoff of Dungeons & Dragons; he keeps a warrior costume complete with a helmet, sword, chain mail, and cape; and he’s painted a galloping stallion on the outside of his van, which he calls his “mighty stead” and has christened “Genevieve.” So deeply has Barley committed to his fantasy role-playing that he has little life outside of it. He is, to borrow a British term now universally associated with Japan, a NEET—Not in Education, Employment, or Training.

This character choice should strike us as a little strange. After all, the narrative idolizes Barley. It practically identifies him as his society’s Ubermensch. The Ubermensch, we’d think, cannot be a LARPer. One lives a life of real danger, whereas the other playacts it—and indeed, Barley hardly sports the ideal masculine physique of an ancient Greek warrior, of the sort trumpeted by such prominent online right-wing personalities as Bronze Age Pervert. Why, then, would the film present a LARPer as its revolutionary?

It is this discordant note in the film’s Nietzschean symphony that alerts us to the presence of a second film unfolding alongside the first. The smoking gun is “Quests of Yore,” Barley’s beloved board game and the plot device that betrays Onward’s Janus face. As established in the first act of this drama, Onward identifies Barley as our moral compass because he has supposedly overcome his society’s decadence, neither forgetting his history nor indulging a lifestyle of crippling convenience. Both of those qualities are grounded in “Quests of Yore,” at once Barley’s history teacher and moral instructor.

The problem with Barley assuming the mantle of non-decadence is that his NEET lifestyle is necessarily parasitic on modern decadence. It is otherwise unsustainable, indeed impossible. The centerpiece of Barley’s LARP—“Quests of Yore”—was sold to him by the same consumerist system responsible for New Mushroomton’s descent into decadence. We know this because it has none of the markings of a homemade game. It comes with a laminated card set, action figures, an information manual, and a stylized logo reminiscent of D&D. By all appearances, this is a slick, corporate product designed to profit off the insular interests of a passionate nerd subculture.

Barley, then, fully conforms to the consumerist lifestyle that Onward codes as decadent. Although the film positions Barley as a social heretic, it also confirms that he’s as much a participant in his society’s misguided ways as the people he reprimands. Barley’s exhaustive historical knowledge doesn’t signal his distance from society, only his particular brand of decadent hedonism. His LARPing doesn’t confirm his revolutionary credentials, only his comfortable socioeconomic bubble.

Barley’s tepid “boldness” reflects that of his father, who is eulogized as audacious for wearing “ugly purple socks” every day. This banal act, framed within the film as a deed of heterodox courage, inspires Ian to “boldly” pursue a list of similarly trivial goals, like driving a car and inviting friends to a party. These are terribly limited horizons. Everything that our protagonists think of as “bold” is either just mildly unusual or simply the norm.

The imaginative bankruptcy of the Lightfoots’ vision, and of Onward itself, is reinforced by the film’s concluding montage. It seems to show a “new” New Mushroomton, one which has rediscovered its magical roots: sprites fly, centaurs gallop, and armored waiters serve the new clientele of The Manticore’s Tavern. Ian repeats verbatim the monologue with which his father opened the film. The past has returned. “Long ago” is now. Yet the changes that Onward presents as revolutionary are cosmetic—visual shorthands for, rather than actual demonstrations of, radical change. The suburbs are cleaner and the scavenging unicorns gone, but The Manticore’s restored tavern isn’t “filled with a motley horde willing to risk life and limb,” only the usual parents and children. Barley replaces “Guinevere” with “Guinevere the Second”—the same exact van as the first, only newer and more orange.5

Onward’s characters ultimately appear unable to escape the decadence of their society. Barley’s and Ian’s journey into the wilderness, though initially promising to transport them far beyond the territorial and imaginative confines of New Mushroomton, only takes them right back to where they began. They cannot reach a world beyond New Mushroomton’s decadent horizons—and neither can Onward.

What we are left with is a timid film critical of our timidity, an imaginatively mediocre product that mourns our imaginative mediocrity. The film cannot actually commit to the radical politics at which it gestures. Much like its characters, Onward is LARPing Nietzsche.

ACT III. “IF YOU BELIEVE THE BRIDGE IS THERE, IT’S THERE”

So Onward is playing a game—or, more accurately, playing several.

One of those games is called, “Who is the protagonist?” The most obvious candidate is Ian Lightfoot. The less obvious but perhaps more appropriate candidate is his brother Barley or his father Wilden. The answer, at least within this three-act narrative, is none of the above. Our secret protagonist, like all good secret protagonists, has been hiding in plain sight, integral but invisible.

The true protagonist of Onward is Guinevere. Guinevere, as a fictitious “mighty stead” that does actually carry Barley to wherever he needs, crystallizes the tension between reality and make-believe inherent to the act of LARPing. All role-playing transpires in a nebulous space between sincerity and irony, between earnest commitment and knowing detachment. Much like the theatrics of a stage performer or the pretend of a child, “authentic” LARPing demands a degree of doublethink. To convince others, the performer must at once believe and disbelieve his performance. Hence the existential-epistemic anxiety raised by the LARPer. When, or does, play-acting become real? If the entirety of Onward is an elaborate LARP, is there a point at which that LARP ceases being LARP?

Guinevere, more than any other character in the film, forces this question to the foreground, and nowhere more acutely than in her final scene. Cornered by a platoon of police officers on a mountain, Barley decides to evade capture by sacrificing Guinevere. He solemnly plays a cassette tape titled “Rise to Valhalla,” a suitably grandiloquent farewell to his gallant companion.6 A rock on the gas pedal and Guinevere is off, racing to oblivion as Barley the Stoic salutes her. The cinematography and sound design leans into Barley’s role-playing fantasy—one of the van’s tires bursts, so that Guinevere literally gallops, clippity-cloppity, to her destiny, even as Barley’s parking tickets burst forth from her windows as wings.7 Guinevere dutifully drives off a rock outcropping and flies into the side of the mountain. Just moments before she crashes, midair with sunlight splashing across her spray-painted face, we hear her engine whinny one last time. The ensuing collision causes an avalanche that blocks the pathway of the police vehicles but also buries the mighty stead.

This entire sequence dramatizes the emotional paradox of LARPing. It is at once an ode and a joke, solemn and snickering. The inherent oddness of the situation—the tragic sacrifice of a beat-up van costumed as a pegasus—forces the scene into an indeterminate space between pathos and bathos. Beneath the operatic melancholia, there is a cloying playfulness, an irreverent wink to the audience—a tacit acknowledgement of the scene’s absurdity. Onward commits enough to the glorious tragedy of it all that one can’t help but take, or want to take, the scene seriously. All the same, there is an undeniable comedy to a van-horse hybrid “flying” and crashing to the tune of faux-epic vocalizations. No other moment in Onward so precisely captures the disorienting psychological ambivalence inherent to LARPing. Are we witnessing a heroic sacrifice, or a parody of one? (Both, of course, in the same way that “Quests of Yore” is at once a game and a map).

When contemplating how to secure the Phoenix Gem that would allow him and Ian to cast the spell that would resurrect their father, Barley immediately rushes to his “Quests of Yore” card set, which he believes has all the information the brothers need. Ian is understandably skeptical, and just a bit incredulous: “Barley, this is from a game.” Barley’s response is key: “Based on real life!” This is Barley’s refrain whenever anyone attempts to denigrate the practical applicability of “Quests of Yore.” The game is, he tells us throughout the film, “historically accurate” and “historically based.”8

This is not a film about the absurdity of Barley’s faith in the facticity of his board game; it is a film about how he’s actually totally right. “Quests of Yore” really does guide the brothers to the right places and really does supply Ian with workable magical spells. “Quests of Yore” purports to contain, and in fact does contain, an impeccably accurate record of this society’s history and tradition. In having a board game unerringly predict the dangers that the brothers encounter and successfully prepare them as needed, Onward undermines the “reality” of their hunt for the Phoenix Gem. It likens the brothers’ dangerous, deadly quest to a game that they are playing—because it quite literally is. “My years of training have prepared me for this very moment,” exclaims Barley—that is, his years of LARPing as a warrior have actually equipped him to be one.

Onward thus eschews any meaningful distinction between role-playing and reality—the skills acquired in the former translate directly to the latter. Laurel can transition from watching gym workouts on the TV in her living room to scaling the back of a dragon because both exist on the same plane of reality (as reaffirmed by the soundtrack of her workout program playing as she runs up the back of the dragon with The Manticore’s enchanted sword). Guinevere is a van, and also really a pegasus.

“This is from a game,” says Ian derisively when Barley treats his gaming guide as a literal spell book, and in proving him wrong (the game is actually reality), the narrative also suggests the inverse (reality is actually a game). “Quests of Yore,” it comes to seem, isn’t “based on real life” so much as “real life” is based on it. Onward essentially “gamifies” reality itself. In its account, there is no distinction between essence and performance—and so there is no difference between reality and LARPing. This is literalized as an in-universe ontological principle when Ian and Barley try to cross over a bottomless pit. Ian casts a spell that forms an invisible bridge. The catch: it is actualized only by the power of belief. Ian finds this absurd, but Barley is unfazed. As he confidently tells Ian, “If you believe that the bridge is there, it’s there.” This is a type of logic that Barley would understand, because it is the one that undergirds and enables the act of LARPing.

“If you believe that the bridge is there, it’s there”— this is the thesis statement of the Age of LARP. It is the gospel of manifestation gurus on TikTok teaching loyal acolytes how to realize their dreams with positive thinking and techno-accelerationists waging memetic warfare to hyperstition their way to the Singularity. Neither manifestation nor hyperstition are inherently irrational concepts, insofar as they theorize, in different ways and to varying degrees of sophistication, the very real and uncanny feedback loop between intangible ideas and physical reality. Imagination expands the boundaries of the real, and the real in turn bounds what is imagined. The performance of what is not yet true can make it true—much as we put ourselves to sleep by pretending to sleep. This quirk of human psychobiology is what gives LARP its transformative potential, and maximizing said potential is the explicit goal of those on its experimental edge.

“Nordic LARP,” named after its geographical point of origin and sometimes opposed to more conventionally escapist “American” or “boffer” LARP,9 is an attempt to elevate LARP to an artform and “explicitly political project.” It is primarily “interested in character as changed and influenced by the game’s narrative,” and it achieves this goal by having players act out dramatic scenarios that are emotionally exhausting, physically taxing, and morally challenging. Player safety is a recurring subject of concern among participants, given that this is a scene that can yield games called Gang Rape.10 Unsurprisingly, Nordic LARP has also yielded “tales of real-world relationships destroyed (and created) by the shockwaves from in-game events.” Nordic LARP simply builds on the ancient wisdom of “fake it till you make it.” It is the postmodern successor of everything from Zen to meditation to intention-setting, the latest way to play with the fluidity of the self. The endgame of so much Nordic LARP is precisely this “narrative bleed,” in which the thoughts and feelings induced by the gameplay “bleed” into and change the players’ actual selves and lives.11

C. Thi Nguyen speaks of games as “the art of agency”—rather than tell stories or create worlds, they create selves. Much like fiction is a library of stories, “games are a library where you can try out different ways of being an agent.” We’re so accustomed to thinking about art in terms of beautiful art objects that we are ill-prepared for an art (games) where the object of beauty is the self. The desires that compel us during gameplay are intense—so intense, indeed, that we can be virtually different people while playing—yet we shed those desires easily the moment the game has ended. The point of any given game, from tag to paintball, is not its posited end, which is always arbitrary; the point is the gameplay itself. To paraphrase Nguyen, in life we choose certain means to achieve desired ends; in gameplay, we choose certain ends to achieve desired means. What sticks with us once a game is over is not our victory or defeat, neither of which matter,12 but rather the novel experience of selfhood created by the gameplay.13

Building on Nguyen, we might say that all gameplay is essentially a kind of LARP: an activity where one temporarily becomes an entirely different agent, obsessed with an entirely arbitrary goal hindered by entirely arbitrary obstacles. LARP, Nordic or otherwise (but especially Nordic), makes the implicit end of gameplay (self-creation) unusually clear because its explicit ends are so often unclear, and yet this unclarity hardly diminishes its appeal.

Nguyen presents us with an implicitly Nietzschean account of play and its aesthetic value. Despite his enduring reputation as an essentially artistic philosopher and philosopher of art, Nietzsche was in fact deeply suspicious of what most people call “art” (paintings, sculptures, and so on). He repeatedly opposed an “art of works of art” to art as a general principle of creativity underlying the will to power.14 Indeed, he condemns the “art of works of art” as the poisoned fruit of a decadent culture. Truly aesthetic man, artistic man, would have no need for works of art, for life itself would be aesthetic and man himself would be a work of art.15

“Art” properly understood is not to be found in any given “art object” outside of and available for the disinterested contemplation of the self, but rather is the self itself in the playful process of self-creation. It is through play that the Übermensch, the ultimate player of the game called life, creates new values. Our proper aspiration is to be the “eternal child” of Zarathustra, the man-child for whom play is not some escape from life, but the very point of it.16 From this standpoint, it is deeply misguided to treat “play” with anything less than the utmost seriousness. “I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks, than as play,” wrote Nietzsche in his last work, Ecce Homo. “This, as a sign of greatness, is an essential prerequisite.”17 So esteemed was play in Nietzsche’s sight that he favored it over “work,” which he saw as little more than self-denial. As he insists in Beyond Good and Evil: “Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”18

From a Nietzschean standpoint, then, Barley’s unemployment—his NEET lifestyle in general—might be less a signifier of decadent indulgence than an appropriately ethical rejection of work. Is not Barley a fitting avatar of our antiwork moment? Isn’t his contemptuous disregard for the labor demanded by capital the new dream of Gen Z, and the hippies and anarchists before them?19 Isn’t Barley modeling an alternative, aspirational notion of agency by insisting on the “gamification” of life—on the universal value of “the art of agency”?

“Man is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss,” writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is a crossing overand a going under.”20 The game of life is not valuable when it is won; it is valuable when it is played. The bridge is not valuable because by it one reaches a destination; the bridge is valuable because it is a bridge.21

Where an unbridgeable gulf emerges between Nguyen and Nietzsche is their perspective on the boundaries of gameplay, or lack thereof. Nietzsche thinks that life itself is play; Nguyen insists that play only obtains within a bounded space carved out of life proper. To say that all of life is a game is to say that football can be played outside of a football field—a nonsense, given that the field, a necessarily circumscribed space, is the premise of the game.

Nguyen is thus always careful to distinguish between games and gamification. Gamification is the extension of the game beyond its organizing limits, and thus its perversion. Gamification is not the intensification of gaming; it is its destruction. Nguyen’s go-to example of gamification is social media, which gamifies (and thereby sabotages) the act of communication by subjecting it to a points system. Other examples abound. On the grimmer end of the spectrum is the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, where the perpetrator live-streamed his massacre in the visual style of first-person shooter video games—what has been called the “gamification of terror.” Military drones, which mimic the user interface of Call of Duty, participate in the same phenomenon.22 Nguyen casts gamification as an unmitigated evil—a desecration of the art of gaming in the name of gaming. For Nietzsche, though he never used the term, “gamification” is the truest art and the greatest way of life.

The struggle over “gamification,” personified here in the poles of Nguyen and Nietzsche, stems from an underlying ambiguity about the location of games in reality. Is life a game, a container of games, or a series of games? If the last, is life itself then not simply a game? Erik Davis argues that “the contemporary urge to ‘gamify’ our social and technological interactions is…simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief,” which accords with the “ludic turn” in psychology and anthropology given to reinterpreting social rituals as play and play as culture. Gamification, then, is to some extent hardwired into human existence: “Human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose ‘game engine’ can—and will be—organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines.”23

What the gamification debate reveals is that fiction, gaming, and LARPing are variants of the same psychic practice. All three work in exactly the same way: through a willed doublethink, a voluntary suspension of disbelief, in which artist and audience co-construct and co-inhabit symbolic universes distinct from but tethered to the physical world, between which they slip at will.24 Fiction, then, must not be confused with falsehood, and neither must gaming or LARPing. Fiction is an epistemic category of knowing make-believe, which is meaningfully distinct from either deception (persuading another that something false is true) or delusion (accepting something false as true).

The question is one of limits. We can accept Nordic LARP and games in general as social technologies which achieve their true ends (self-making) via imaginary ends (a made-up prize). However, if indeed LARP is always a performance whose ultimate end is a readjustment or modification of the “true” self of the performer, then is not its telos ultimately an erosion of its own limits? Is not the end of the game we call LARP the end of LARP?25

The true LARPer always understands that he is LARPing, just as the literary aficionado always understands that he is reading fiction—the doublethink is definitional, the suspension of disbelief necessarily willing. In LARP, as with all fiction, we will ourselves to believe that something is true when we know it is not. There is no LARP absent the will to believe; the moment the LARPer no longer wills his (dis)belief, the moment he helplessly and naively buys into his own performance, he is no longer LARPing. He is doing, or more accurately has become, something else.

We misunderstand Barley when we think that his ostracization, his misfittedness, stems from his nerdy roleplaying lifestyle. The real-life LARPer is not a social misfit; he is in fact exceptionally well-socialized. He switches easily between his many masks, because he knows the social lay of the land and adeptly navigates its variegated topographies. There is a reason that LARP (like all games) can only happen once its borders have been firmly demarcated and its participants momentarily withdrawn from “life.” So well-adjusted is the LARPer to his society that he steps in and out of its revolving door of prescribed roles at a whim, from dad to friend to coworker to medieval warrior and back. His social discernment—that is, his immunity to “narrative bleed”—is precisely what licenses his LARP.

When the “bleed” pursued by LARP is complete, such that the circles of self and performance are one, the self-making mechanism of LARP breaks down. The distance between truth and costume, between actor and authenticity, between life and play, is exactly what enables LARP’s alchemy of self. LARP simply cannot work absent this opposition. Its formal structure is necessarily Platonic—LARP operates through the mischievous interplay of the above and below, essence and appearance, reality and representation. Its thrill comes from the reckless suggestion of blurring and even collapsing these two worlds, but this must always remain a suggestion, a seduction, an asymptotic jouissance.

LARP is a bridge between two worlds or it is nothing, and the difficulty with Nietzsche is that he crusaded to bury dualism in the depthless flux of oneworldness. The entirety of his philosophical project he distilled as “inverted Platonism.”26 To expunge from human thought the Platonic “true world” of Ideas, and with it the world of appearances, such that appearance itself became the true world—this “twisting free” of Platonism is what Heidegger called Nietzsche’s “final step,” before at last “madness befell him.”27

Onward, then, is not actually about LARP at all—it is about the end of LARP. It announces a gamified world no longer capable of LARPing, a world which cannot exercise the sophisticated, childish doublethink necessary to LARP, a world for which LARP ceases to be even a possibility. Onward knows only one world, the world of appearances, where to play is to really do, to pretend is to really be.28 To the extent that Onward LARPs Nietzsche, it is really Nietzschean. There is, finally, nothing but the simulacrum. Barley never has to “grow up,” or realize that he is indeed a “screwup,” or come back down from his fantasies to the “real world” —no, the rest of the world has to come around to his solipsism, for he is after all an Abrahamic misfit. Onward is about what happens when LARP cannibalizes culture, or when culture reduces to LARP; it is about what happens when the end of LARP ends it.

Onward is not about LARPers; it is about madmen. It is a portrait of civilizational insanity. It is a portrait of our insanity.

IV. DENOUMENT: A GOING UNDER

Insanity, to be clear, is eminently rational in conditions of hyperreality. The world of digital technology and financial capitalism is a simulated one powered almost entirely by the power of belief. From speculation on the stock market to the Federal Reserve’s make-a-wish printing of money, this is a world where reality is decided by individual and institutional fiat. If you believe the bridge is there, it’s there.

Jean Baudrillard's presence is always felt whenever and wherever hyperreality is invoked, but his infamous Simulacra and Simulation is really the theoretical consummation of Nietzsche’s madness.29 Plato showed the way out of the cave; Kant sealed its exit; Nietzsche revealed there’s nothing to exit to; and Baudrillard doubled down to expose cave and outside alike as representations-in-themselves. His is a world of copies without origin and images which realize their consumer. In this society of consumption, “daily life ends up being a replica of the model,” whether that model comes from opinion polls, news stories, advertisers, film, television, or, now, the Internet. It is not that we can no longer differentiate truth from falsehood or that the Image has effaced the Real, but that such distinctions are obsolete in a cybernetic age of infinite feedback loops. When speech is “industrialized on the same basis as the production of material goods,”30 as it is by mass media, reality is tautological—spoken into existence and sustained by the repetition of the utterance.

“All it takes, when He wills something, is to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is!”31— here at last is the madness, the hubris, the literal inhumanity, of hyperreal man. The apotheosis of LARP, the completion of bleed, is apotheosis. Hyperreal man, that is to say, Nietzschean man, is not only insane, but desires insanity. He wants to be mad—to be a Young-Girl and schizoposter and fictosexual and otherkin. He wants to kill all normies. If we’re all Nietzscheans now, it is because we finally live in his world. Reality has caught up with Zarathustra. Here, neck-deep in feeds of information and streams of code, the true world has finally become a fable. There is only the free play of signs by free spirits, the world and self nothing but physiology and will. The infonaut cosplays as himself.

Perhaps this is the only way beyond decadence. “Priests and moralists have all wanted to take mankind back, wrench it back, to an earlier standard of virtue,” wrote Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols. “There is nothing for it: you have to go forward—that is to say step by step further and further into decadence….We can hinder this development, and by so doing dam up and accumulate degeneration itself and render it more convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.”32 Here is the proto-accelerationist strategy that has become one of Nietzsche’s great legacies, from the Italian Futurists to Deleuze and Guattari to, yes, Baudrillard.33 How to exit a system that permits no exit? An excess of system; to push a system so far it collapses under its own systematicity. Hence Nietzsche declared himself “a decadent” and also “the reverse;” the former because he was modern, the latter because it is by his modernity that he resisted modernity.

Perhaps the same can be said of Barley. Again, consider Guinevere. She is, on the one hand, a mass-produced automobile, and therefore yet another symbol of New Mushroomton’s decadent consumerism. On the other hand, she is Barley’s and no one else. Through dedication to his role-playing fantasy, Barley remakes his van in his image. He replaces her radio, headlights, brakes, tires, rim, and air conditioning system. The license plate reads “GWINVER,” while the sides of the van sport a painted image of a glowing pegasus. From this personalization of Guinevere comes the film’s name—taped over the “D” on the van’s dashboard is a paper “O,” for “onward.” Barley overrides the vehicle’s factory settings in favor of his own vision. Unlike his relationship with “Quests of Yore,” then, Barley’s relationship with Guinevere goes beyond one-sided consumption. There is personality in Barley’s engagement with his van. Through Guinevere, Barley becomes what Henry Jenkins calls the “empowered consumer”: a co-creator or even re-creator of an initially mass-produced, commercial product.

But is the “empowered consumer” (and, by extension, the revolutionary accelerationist) anything but an oxymoron? Even here, Barley can only re-signify Guinevere by referencing other mass-circulated signs he has consumed, and no matter how he re-signifies her, he is finally limited by her materiality as a van. That he does not perceive this is, again, because he is not a LARPer. He thinks Guinevere really is a pegasus, the same way that the anti-Trump protestors waving Andorsigns think they really are rebels, and just as protestors invoking The Hunger Games a decade before them did. This collapse of LARP is only possible in that part of the world where the Gulf War did not take place, in the capital of capital.34

But does it matter whether or not Guinevere is “really” a pegasus? Is that not, yet again, the instinctive retreat to a reality principle that misunderstands hyperreality as a synonym for non-reality? Regardless of what Guinevere “is,” what she “does” is all the same: incite a rockslide that blocks the police officers and enables the Lightfoot brothers to complete their quest. As far as the officers and the brothers are concerned, in terms of the evidence of their senses, Guinevere is a pegasus. It is, furthermore, Barley’s faith in her pegasus-ness that convinces him to send her off on her final flight in the first place. “Reality” reciprocated his mental model.

Poe’s Law is the epistemology of hyperreality.35 The performance of extremes is always liable to be mistaken as extremism, and therefore simply be extremism. Our hegemonic systems of surveillance and control are structurally incapable of discerning between the appearance of something wrong and the actual presence of wrongness, because both are translated through the same homogenizing apparatus of perception, and so are made to belong to the same order of Image. Intention is irrelevant. This is another way of saying that LARPing is not possible under conditions of cybernetic governance. Irony is over, and LARPing is inherently ironic. Neither online users nor apparatuses of power can read LARP as LARP. Perhaps the end of LARP as an intentional practice of doublethink is partly a response to the end of LARP as a social hermeneutic.

If all is already symbolic, if performance is always real, then perhaps Nietzschean accelerationism is a viable path onward. But it is only a perhaps. Onward itself dwells in an indeterminate space between commitment to and critique of its own Nietzscheanism, if only inadvertently. Recall, again, that strange final scene, where we meet the New New Mushroomtoon, same as the Old New Mushroomton, except that its people have abandoned their debilitating dependence on technology and embraced their inner magic.36 But that’s precisely what’s so odd, even absurd about it: this societal re-enchantment and collective self-overcoming does not appear to have overturned the forever status quo of postwar American suburbia. All that the return of magic has produced is newer, fancier kinds of consumption and signification—a more “authentic” experience at The Manticore’s Tavern, a prettier paint job for the Guinevere the Second, and so on. Onward seems to give us Nietzschean self-creation as neoliberal individualism: the worst-case outcome for the Zarathustrian project of play-as-revolution. It is a world of madmen, but in a world which has not reciprocated their madness—is it for this, really only this, that we killed the LARPer?

Notes

I recently rewatched the acclaimed sci-fi drama Black Mirror in preparation for the release of the latest season on Netflix. Working my way through the third season while sitting in my Prague apartment, an episode called “Nosedive” caught my attention. I had seen the episode when it first aired in 2016, but this time I noticed something different.

Set in a near-future dystopia (like most episodes), “Nosedive” centers on the cut-throat world of social credit scores. Digital eye implants and smart phone swipes enable individuals to rate each other, creating an incessant need to maintain the approval of fellow citizens. Our protagonist is a woman trying to get to her childhood friend’s wedding—the friend is an elitist snob with a very high credit score and makes no secret of this—but, due to a day of altercations, her credit score has fallen below the required level to board her flight. She tries to rent a car instead but, following another argument (this time with the car rental attendant), her score drops even lower, forcing her to take the oldest and worst model the rental company had available.

As she gets in the car and presses the central control panel, the vehicle (more of an autonomous futuristic pod) comes to life. The onboard AI begins talking to our protagonist in a foreign language: “Ahoj! Řiďte opatrně (Hi! Drive carefully),” it repeats in a monotone voice. Her failure to understand the language only exacerbates her general frustration. She cycles through the incomprehensible digital menu trying to find the ignition button, accidentally turning on the onboard entertainment system, which begins playing a TV show from the 1990s, dubbed in the same unknown language. She becomes increasingly agitated, impatiently fastening her seatbelt and finally getting the engine started. Sometime later, after a disappointing call with the snarky bride, the car again begins to speak in the same foreign tongue: “Baterie vybitá, nedostatek energie (Battery depleted, insufficient energy),” repeating itself over and over. “What do you want?!” she exclaims before spotting the flashing “low battery” sign and pulling over. Failing to find a charger that fits her outdated car, she ends up on the side of the highway, utterly dejected, thumbing for a ride. —End scene.

Unbeknownst to most of the show’s primary audience of Western (and specifically Anglo-American) viewers, the language of the onboard AI was in fact Czech. This is not important for the episode’s storyline but cleverly guides us toward subconscious feelings of discomfort and confusion, mimicking the feelings of our protagonist. To a Western audience, the use of Czech creates feelings of something that is both known and unknown. What is “known” is that Czech sounds Slavic (or Russian to the untrained ear), and this subconsciously unearths negative Eastern European tropes: bleak, backward, and basic, much like the retrograde car rental. Presumably “unknown,” however, is that Czech is not Russian (far from it in fact). But what are the odds a Western viewer can successfully differentiate one from the other? These subconscious sensations enable the viewer to experience the protagonist’s feelings of isolation and inferiority through nothing more than a carefully chosen sociocultural-linguistic trigger. To be clear, the show’s writers did not choose Kazakh or Tamil or Maltese for the onboard AI—Czech was deliberate. Incidentally, the dubbed TV show that was playing in the background was the 1990s American sitcom Home Improvement, starring Tim Allen as “Tim the Toolman Taylor,” serving to situate the Western viewer in their own past by amplifying the feeling of outdatedness.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not so—the only article I could find on this was a short piece written on the Prague-based website Expats.cz: “And to emphasize just how shitty the car is, it happens to speak Czech,” writes the local American journalist Dave Park. No further analysis was given. What we can say, however, is that the effectiveness with which Black Mirror utilizes this trigger is nothing new. Propelled by essentialized Western propaganda about the adversarial East during the Cold War, blockbuster films and shows have been saturated with orientalized stimuli and “common enemy” tropes for decades. What caught my attention was that it still works. But why?

Ezekial Adamovsky’s notion of “Euro-Orientalism” will help us answer that and the following three questions:

1. When did the concept of a so-called Eastern Europe emerge?
2. How did this concept lead to a “Euro-Orientalist” discursive system?
3. To what extent is “Eastern Europe” still conceptually relevant?

Euro-Orientalism and the Invention of Eastern Europe

Edward Said’s influential opus, Orientalism, deftly explains how Western colonial discourse creates an exoticized, essentialized, and totalized “Other” that stands as a deliberate counterpoint to the modern, rational, and civilized Western “Self.” Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Said argues that with the projection of power from the core of hegemonic societies comes the means to produce knowledge—including knowledge of the “Other” and “Self”—which may in turn be used to justify power. This basic idea will help situate our concern about Eastern Europe.

Euro-orientalism is a type of Eurocentrism, but it is not to be understood as a mere duplicate of the orientalized discourse present during the colonization, subjugation, and scientific racism of nineteenth-century European imperialism. What is comparable, however, is the emergence of a discursive system in academic and civic circles that normalized ideas surrounding the conceptualization of an Eastern Europe which was barbarous rather than civilized, traditional rather than modern, totalitarian rather than free, and homogenous rather than diverse.1 Divisive dichotomies are inherent in civilizational discourse, and as Piotr Twardzisz argues, “[t]he primary division into Western and Eastern Europe would not be possible at all if the latter were not ascribed the quality of ‘otherness’.”2

For much of its history, Eastern Europe has been viewed by its neighbors as a “land of absence.”3 Like most “imaginative geographies,”4 it remains largely ambiguous, or, in the words of Twardzisz, “subconsciously indeterminate.”5 Whether categorized geographically (as a hinterland to warring empires), ideologically (due to the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, and communism), or ethnoculturally (as the home of the Slavs), there is no overriding consensus on what Eastern Europe was or is. Yet feelings about its “otherness” endure, often in socioeconomic and political terms.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in their influential book Why Nations Fail, argue that the first notable West/East divisions of Europe were socioeconomic, becoming visible in the aftermath of the Black Death during the middle of the fourteenth century. In Britain, the deadly plague—killing fifty percent of those it infected—led to the Peasants Revolt in the late fourteenth century and the beginning of the end of serfdom. This, in turn, led to a more inclusive labor market, greater commerce, and urbanization. In Eastern Europe, however, it caused the expansion of landlord controls, the prolongation of the feudalist system, and an increasing reliance on Western European demand for grain—a period known as the Second Serfdom.6 As Acemoglu and Robinson tell us, within a relatively short time, socioeconomic fortunes had dramatically changed across the continent: “Though in 1346 there were few differences between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were worlds apart.”7

It was not until the “long nineteenth century” in France, however, that derogatory constructions of Russia and Eastern Europe—often viewed synonymously—gained greater currency within public discourse. Though Ezekial Adamovsky admits that German and Nordic cultures referred to an Eastern Europe earlier than the French, the influence of the Napoleonic era cannot be overstated.8 The French philosopher and political theorist Germaine de Staël, for example, picked up on the idea of the “inauthenticity of Russian civilization,” first popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and further extended her critique to Eastern Europe in general.9 A recurring theme in Saidian orientalist discourse is that what the East lacks (rather than what it possesses) is what defines it. Adamovsky suggests these “missing elements” of civilization in Russia included: an independent nobility, intermediate bodies, urban development, a large bourgeoise, and an independent civil society.10 For Staël, though she felt the Slavs would one day become influential, it was Latin Europe’s classical legacy and Germanic Europe’s feudal institutions that made the continent what it was—“[the] ‘Slavonic civilization’ was still too recent, and for the moment […] had [only] produced cultural “imitations” […] and nothing ‘original’.”11

As nationalism grew in mid-nineteenth century Western Europe, so too did Russophobia. This led to a reactionary Russian nationalism as a countermeasure to Prussian and French nationalism. As such, the Russians created their own derogatory tropes about what they thought constituted a typical Prussian or Frenchman, while welcoming romanticized ideas of what it meant to be Russian. This is apparent, for example, in the concept of the “Russian soul.” Initially coined by Nikolai Gogol and Vissarion Belinsky as a critique of Russian feudalism, it later morphed into a new brand of Russian exceptionalism through writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky.12

The “Slavic Soul” was another similar and recurring theme, perhaps best captured by the Czech secessionist painter, Alfonse Mucha, in the pieces comprising his Slav Epic—a cycle of twenty unique canvases completed in 1928. Though produced after the pan-Slavism movement had subsided, Mucha’s canvases are an excellent example of the marrying of Slavic culture, history, and ethno-nationalism to create an embellished sense of Slavic destiny.13

Simply, pan-Slavic counter-nationalism was a response to Western European chauvinism. In Prague in 1848, Bohemian-Czech revolutionaries—keen to break away from Austro-Hungarian rule—hosted the first pan-Slav Congress. The movement sought to distance Slavs from their non-Slavic rulers and, like all pan-nationalist movements, to establish a common thread that unified the Slavs as a collective national body. It was during this period that usage of the term Europe Orientale became especially popular among Western Europeans who were “concerned” about the growth of Slavic national consciousness.

Liminal Lands: Geographies of Eastern and Central Europe

For much of its history, the region encompassing Central and Eastern Europe was a land occupied and strategized over by multiple regional powers, including but not limited to the Habsburg Monarchy, the Prussian Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The disadvantageous geography of the Eastern European plains and lowlands meant much of the region’s geopolitical experience was defined by conquest. This was perhaps best understood in modern times through the German concept of Lebensraum (living space)—an idea thought up by the Prussian geographer Friedrick Ratzel in the early days of the Second Reich, but put into brutal effect by German eastward expansionism in both world wars.

In the words of Alan Palmer, “[t]he lands which separate Germany and Italy from Russia lack natural frontiers; they are organisms with vertebrae and arteries but no external shell.”14 The ultimate division of these vulnerable lands was sealed in 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, when Winston Churchill declared that “[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” As Churchill’s words destined Europe to ideological divergence, the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe found themselves contained within a variety of communist, socialist, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes. From this point, it was the West that would see itself progressing into a modern democratic future, while the East was to remain static, despotic, and inherently limited.

During the Cold War, the West went to great lengths to understand and document this new eastern adversary of the USSR and its satellites. Government funded research institutes, numerous university study programs, and influential texts like Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism created a West/East anxiety that centered on “the metaphysical issue of the limits between Europe and Asia.”15

Notwithstanding the caricatured portrayal of life behind the Iron Curtain in Western discourse, socioeconomic opportunities and political freedoms were, by design, considerably fewer in much of the Eastern Bloc. Though these trends are rapidly changing in a globalizing Europe, in the case of what was once the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or more commonly East Germany), there remains a visible relic boundary between it and what was once West Germany, revealing the socioeconomic fallout of a bygone era: less disposable income, higher unemployment, fewer registered companies, higher agrarianism, more right-leaning voters, and fewer young people. The impact of the communist era—combined with ineffective post-communist integration in Germany—is undeniable. Interestingly, even the city infrastructure between what was West Berlin and East Berlin is visibly different.

One people who have been keen to disregard the remnants of the Cold War and establish themselves as the most “West of the East” are the Czechs. Positioned at a cultural and geographic crossroads, where Germanic and Slavic Europe meet (and with its capital Prague located further west than Vienna), the Czech Republic (or Czechia, as the locals refuse to call it) fervently insists that it is in Central rather than Eastern Europe. The Czechs stand with Lithuania and Slovenia as the most economically prosperous post-communist nations in Europe. But despite this, they are still generally viewed by the West as Eastern Europeans.16 Once situated at the center of European culture and influence (Prague was twice the capital of the Holy Roman Empire), the Czechs have to some extent been forgotten—relegated to the periphery of Western civilization. Tourists journey in droves to see the Charles Bridge, the Prague Castle, or the fifteenth century Astronomical Clock. But it is the wonders of the museum of human history they seek, not to marvel at modernity; they come to see what was, not what is.

Relabeling Eastern European regions in the hope of exorcising the ghosts of the past is riddled with issues. Central Europe, for example, or Mitteleuropa as it was called by the Germans, is historically linked to Germanic influence. Slovenia and Croatia—the two most affluent states in ex-Yugoslavia—are generally considered Central European due to the influence of Catholicism and the Austo-Hungarian Empire. Due to this imperial history, the Czechs have a lot more in common with Slovenes or Croats than they do with Serbs or Bulgarians, despite their collective Slavic ancestry. Yet notwithstanding their fiery political rhetoric, within the Western Balkans many people consider themselves part of a Yugoslav family, often harking back to a better time when they were unified under Josip Tito’s beloved republic.

However you slice it, the controversy around the etymology of Central and Eastern Europe is clear. East-Central Europe is now a more widely accepted term and comprises a vast transnational zone between historically German, Russian, and Ottoman-influenced Europe. Paul Robert Magocsi, in his prolific Historical Atlas of Central Europe, breaks East-Central Europe into three zones: The Northern Zone, the Alpine-Carpathian Zone, and the Balkan Zone.17 Though Magocsi admits there is no consensus on European regions, his delineations attempt to provide socio-geographic nuance by shifting focus away from historical preconceptions.

The example of Europe teaches a wider lesson about the nature of socioeconomic division and its impact on our values and perspectives. Civilizational dichotomies are nothing new in European history. In the days of antiquity, it was the civilized Greco-Roman South versus the uncivilized barbarian Germanic North. In time, the South/North binary rotated 90 degrees clockwise, leaving Paris, London, and Amsterdam as the “new Romes,” and Eastern Europe—with its Ottoman and Russian influencers—the new barbarians. Europe has always been keen to establish its periphery and its Others who sit beyond it.

The hope for a unified Europe that finds common ground with all of its composite parts has plagued the European Union for decades. Some suggest the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the catalyst that pulls Europe together, driving Eastern European states closer to the Western core. This of course negates Russia’s own Europeaness. Though there is an inevitability about civilizational polarities and their need for largely fictionalized supporting narratives, the very notion of an Eastern Europe (or a Western Europe for that matter) derived from anything other than geography is based on abstract tropes that, when socioeconomically or politically reified, prevent Europeans from seeing each other as equals rather than counter-points to different national agendas.