a heightened cycle of protest and riot in England after 2010 was followed by a failed but surprisingly close referendum on Scottish independence four years later. Even that paled into insignificance, however, when in 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union, becoming the first member-state in its history to do so.
While ‘Brexit’ was the most important political moment in Europe for a generation, it was soon outdone by events across the Atlantic when, just a few months later, Donald Trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the United States. Less than a decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was now undeniable. An expansionist Russia, isolationist Britain and broken economic model had all been outdone by a reality TV star becoming the most powerful person on Earth. History was back.
Trump’s inauguration speech the following February stood in defiant contrast to the heady rhetoric of his predecessor, Barack Obama, when he assumed ofice eight years earlier. Claiming that the system was failing ordinary Americans, Trump’s explicit message of social decay and aggrieved nationalism became his immediate signature in ofice.
And yet in a strange way, despite their markedly diferent forms of presentation, Obama and Trump shared a similar faith in the unique ability of markets to find solutions. After all, anything else is tantamount to heresy in a world of capitalist realism – where the end of the world is more plausible than the end of capitalism.
This condition presents arguably the most pressing crisis of all: an absence of collective imagination. It is as if all humanity has been aflicted by a psychological complex, capitalist realism making us believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it – as if it were not our ancestors who created what stands before us now. As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds.
The Great Disorder
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