after the fall of Ben Ali, they failed to see it coming. In an article titled ‘Why the Tunisian revolution won’t spread’, Stephen M. Walt, Harvard professor of international relations, opined that: ‘The history of world revolution suggests that this sort of revolutionary cascade is quite rare, and even when some sort of revolutionary contagion does take place, it happens pretty slowly and is often accompanied by overt foreign invasion.’2
Even when Tahrir Square was occupied, they could not see it coming. On the night of 25 January, Hillary Clinton told reporters: ‘Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.’3 On the same day, Israel’s military intelligence chief told the Knesset much the same thing. He predicted that Mubarak would ‘be able to keep the demonstrations in check’, and echoed Clinton’s words: the regime was ‘stable’.4
And even when the revolution was all but over, some could still not see it. Peter Mandelson, the former Labour minister, made an extraordinary plea to the global elite to save the Egyptian dauphin, Gamal Mubarak:
Gamal Mubarak … has been the leading voice in favour of change within the government and the ruling party. Of course, it is easy to cast him as the putative beneficiary of a nepotistic transfer of family power, the continuation of ‘tyranny’ with a change of face at the top. This analysis, in my view, is too simplistic.
For a good six months, then, the Western political elite, media, academia and intelligence services were effectively driving with a shattered windscreen. But why?
The specific myopia over the Arab states is not hard to explain. Decades ago, Edward Said tried to warn the West about the self-deluding nature of its narrative on the Middle East:
Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.5
Said’s words were written in 1980: long before 9/11, before two invasions of Iraq had laid the basis for sectarian civil war there, and before the West began to conflate the narrative of Islam with al-Qaeda’s narrative of ruthless, nihilistic terror. For Carnegie scholar Tarek Masoud, the misapprehension goes deeper than the problem of cultural stereotypes:
Those of us who study the region not only failed to predict the [Mubarak] regime’s collapse, we actually saw it as an exemplar of something we called ‘durable authoritarianism’—a new breed of modern dictatorship that had figured out how to tame the political, economic, and social forces that routinely did in autocracy’s lesser variants.6
This gets closer to the root cause of disorientation, and holds lessons valid beyond the Middle East. A flaw in the West’s political psyche had convinced people that dictatorships could be stable and sustainable, flying in the face of a 200-year-old doctrine equating capitalism and freedom. But none of this explains the depth of the disorientation: something in the intellectual Kool-Aid had atrophied our ability to think beyond the present.
Indifference to class, the one-dimensional mindset of the professional ‘Arabists’ and outright self-interest all played a part in misleading the political right. But the left, too, was disoriented. The key problem was spelled out by the theorist Fredric Jameson in 2003: ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’7
Twenty years of capitalist realism
When a cheetah catches a gazelle there is always a moment where the prey gives up: it goes floppy, bares its neck, becomes resigned to its fate. You have got me, it seems to say, but now you have to kill me; in the meantime I will try to think about something else.
This has been the relationship between the right and the left since the early 1990s. The organized working class of the Fordist era was smashed, the Soviet Union—if no longer a role model, then at least a pole of opposition to US dominance—was gone. State capitalism and Keynesian economics had been supplanted. Modernism, the beloved republic that had begun with Picasso and Kandinsky, had been overthrown by such geniuses as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Rock and roll was dead several times over; the airwaves now sizzled with litanies to rape and murder by black dudes with diamond earrings. What to do?
If we look at the main intellectual contributions from the left in this period, they are effectively rationalizations of defeat. Jameson’s seminal 1991 account of postmodernism defines it as a ‘condition’, reliant on new technology, a new mass psychology of passivity and the fragmentation of meaning within culture. In this condition, he writes, there is
an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything … What we now begin to feel … is henceforth, where everything now submits to the perpetual change of fashion and media image, that nothing can change any longer.8
On top of this there was the media: vast, powerful, impervious to criticism, corporate, and monopolized by the rich. Chomsky and Herman’s celebrated book on the media, Manufacturing Consent, outlined the ways in which control over the media allowed capitalism to assert a new cultural dominance:
The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.9
While that may have been correct when the book was first published, it is striking that the emergence of the Internet did not fundamentally change its authors’ analysis. In their 2002 introduction to a revised edition of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman concluded that the Internet, while a powerful tool for activists, would make no difference to the ability of corporate interests to control the media, or to its essential role as propagandist for big corporations. They judged that the rapid commercialization and concentration of the Internet ‘threatens to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle’.
When it came to philosophy, leftists who had railed against ‘bourgeois ideology’ now abandoned the very concept. Slavoj Žižek rejected the idea that ideology was ‘false consciousness’, arguing, effectively, that ideology is consciousness: it is impossible to escape the mental trap created by capitalism, because one’s life inside the system constantly recreates it. Instead of rebellion we are reduced to perpetual cynicism: we are trapped, like Neo in The Matrix, in a world we know to be half true. But we can’t escape: ‘Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.’10
Add it all up and you get the mindset of the left in an era of defeat. Nothing can change. Dissent is not strong enough to break the media’s stranglehold; only irony or flight are possible.
By the late 1990s, Western mass culture was dominated by this zeitgeist of impotence. Future movie historians will look at the Hollywood catalogue and see this as the dominant theme of the 2000s: from The Matrix and The Truman Show to the Bourne movies, from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to films as various as Avatar and Inception, through all of them there flows the notion of ‘manipulated consciousness’: the suspicion that the hero is trapped within a malevolent system that controls his mind, but which he cannot defeat. This is no longer the external control of Orwell’s 1984, but a pre-programmed alternative reality against which the hero cannot deploy core human values like love and decency.
In an influential essay, cultural commentator Mark Fisher describes the impact of all this on a generation
