Jihad Vs. McWorld
Benjamin Barber examines whether democracy can survive against these two forces, one primarily economic and one primarily cultural. It’s a comprehensive analysis but one that serves, ultimately, as a footnote to Marx.
In March 1992, Benjamin Barber argued in The Atlantic that two “axial principles of our age” threatened democracy worldwide. Tribalism, or Jihad, is a reaction to “globalism,” or McWorld, the homogenizing tidal wave of global capitalism. Soon to be rebranded “globalization,” McWorld was preordained to win in the struggle, which only made Jihad “not…an instrument of policy” but rather an “emblem of identity…an end in itself.”
Most interesting about the eponymous book that followed the article is Barber’s examination of the twin assaults on democracy from these two diametrically opposed yet dialectically fused forces.
The first part of the book explains how McWorld came to be. “The New World of McWorld” has grown out of trade, is governed by large multi-national corporations, and overpowers the nation-state in its machinations. The American Rust Belt is a living monument to the imperative of factory owners to move production abroad, and the 2008 financial crisis and its subsequent bail outs bear out Barber when he writes “In a world where socialism has disappeared, it can still be found lurking in the boardrooms of failing and bad-risk investment companies…that yearn to spread their losses across the backs of long-suffering taxpayers.”
Barber coins the unwieldy term “infotainment telesector” to refer to McWorld’s chief means of spreading:
“…those who create and control the world of signs and symbols through which all information, communication, and entertainment are mediated, including wordsmiths and image-spinners like advertisers, moviemakers, journalists, intellectuals, writers, and even computer programmers….”
Today, the similarly amorphous term “social media” covers much of the same ground.
This is the section of the book where Barber is most prescient. When ones thoughts, tastes, and even behaviors can be manipulated by invisible, faraway forces, the urge to resist is visceral. In a sentence mutually intelligible to both Francophiles and jihadists alike, Barber writes “Nowhere is American monoculture more evident or more feared than in its movies and videos.”
Why this is has less to do with nefarious marketing strategies and more to do with how much more easily the brain reacts to information transmitted in pictures, at the expense of imagination, as Barber puts it. A similar point was made by Al Gore in The Assault on Reason some years later, where he examines the consequences for democratic deliberation once television superceded newspapers as an information source.
“This form of power, scarcely visible, is not easily rendered accountable”
In a world that’s post-Cambridge Analytica, data leaks, intentionally provocative algorithmic feeds, and the ongoing, multifaceted catastrophe that is Elon Musk’s “X,” it seems Barber was on to something.
Recent political trends in the United States provide further proof of Barber’s wisdom. As a fascist undercurrent in American life is nearly as old as the country itself, the 14 words bear a striking resemblance to Barber’s definition of the “moral preservationists” cause:
“…whether in America, Israel, Iran, or India, [they] have no choice but to make war on the present to secure a future more like the past: depluralized, monocultured, unskepticized, reenchanted”
Make America Great Again, in short.
However, while Barber’s analysis of the dangers globalization and reaction pose to democracy is largely sound, his analysis of power is not.
Regarding the infotainment telesector, its atomizing tendencies and global reach, Barber writes “I see no conspirators here, no stealth tyrants using information to secure hegemony.”
This has very much not been the case, and even the Old Media he cites, for example Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., was doing exactly that for decades. Other examples abound: Peter Thiel bankrupting Gawker, Elon Musk boosting the voices of the “alt-right” (what we called “Neo-Nazis” is a less guarded age), Marc Zuckerberg’s proto-presidential campaign, and attempts to deliberately create social-media echo-chambers for that same right-wing.
It’s a tendency you can often see among academics who don’t want to appear partisan: they sketch out a convincing picture of class conflict, its logic, its machinery, but then elide exactly who the actors in this drama are. It’s not vulgar Marxism to point out that were one to divide the world into workers and owners, one could just as easily identify who’s who, not relying on class reductionism to explain the way of the world. The interests of “democrats” are diametrically opposed to “anti-democrats,” “fascists,” “theocrats,” etc.
We know who these people are and how their power can be curtailed.
Towards the end of the book, Barber chides today’s “half-baked citizens” who “abdicate their own majority powers in favor of term limits, constitutional amendments, and supermajorities.” These same features of fake republican paralysis persist to 2024.
When it comes to the US, it’s important to note that the forces of jihad are very much concentrated in the Republican Party, which has no interests in governing but has all interests in letting global, oligarchic capitalism run wild. The bizarre fusion between plutocracy and jihad is alive and well. Without reclaiming the dignity of democratic citizenship and class consciousness, it will have a very long life indeed.
