There is such a thing as global weather, though no one can
predict it, neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Che Guevara. Not Hegel, not Woodrow
Wilson, and certainly not Gorbachev.
Global weather is as difficult to predict as the meteorological
version. And yet there is such a thing. Everyone alive in 1968 felt it; it was
as if history were coming to an epitome. Many were stunned by the counter thrust
—Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping.
These days we throw around words like "fascism" to
explain current politics but maybe we need to peer beneath such ideological categories
and recognize that this, above all, the age of the strong man.
The evidence is too abundant. One of those things you either
ignore or explain away if you can.
In the United States there is the populist, anti-democratic
Trump, of course.
In Russia, there is wildly popular, anti-democratic Putin.
In China, Xi Jinping is, as the LA Times described him,
"on the cusp of gaining power unseen since Mao Tse-tung."
The US, Russia, China — the three great powers. What global
mood do they reflect or collaborate to fashion?
On a smaller scale there is of course Turkey's Erdogen. And
though I don't mean to complicate the issue beyond reckoning, Netanyahu is on
this scale, too, Netanyahu as Israel's seemingly eternal, eternally crushing potentate.
It's the age of the strong man. Whatever can be done for
democracy must reckon with that brute fact.