Clarity. It is what you and I need now, more than ever. It is no exaggeration to say the future balances precariously on a razor’s edge.

Where are we to find it, this mysterious thing called clarity? Let us begin with what we know. Really know. Not merely what we wish, hope, yearn, or long for.

One of the great and most solid findings in modern macroeconomics — and there aren’t too many of those — is the simple fact that financial crises are followed by right wing surges. In a very straightforward manner: the greater the crisis, the more extreme the swing.

And yet. Today, we have a significant faction of people that believe today’s extremist tide has nothing at all to do with economics — not with the greatest financial crisis in modern history, not the stagnation of wages, not the implosion of the middle class. That it is “just racism”.

Which of these two positions sounds to you like reason, logic, and fact — and which like hopeful yearning?

I hear people touting themselves as “the resistance” every day now. To, of course, rising global extremism. But what are they really resisting? Usually, the “resistance” are the very people who appear to believe that extremism does not have economic origins — that is it racism qua racism, racism and only racism.

Is it? Let us consider it more deeply. If extremism doesn’t have economic origins, then it is a mighty coincidence indeed that the globe is plunging headlong into stagnation, and extremism is rising at the same time. A coincidence so great that it binds our hands — for human action is no match for destiny, is it? So calling it coincidence leaves us impotent. We’ll get to that shortly. First, let us ask: who planned such a coincidence? What are the chances? Why, never before in modern history, not a single time, has extremism arisen during good times — and only bad ones? The answer is very simple. The premise is wrong. Extremism arises when economies sour.

The people who deny that extremism has economic origins are essentially liberalism’s equivalent of climate change denialists. Conservatives deny the facts on the environment — but liberals do so about the economy. The facts are very clear. Extremism does not rise ex nihilo, from the void. It has a material cause throughout history — whether it is Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Germany, or post-Imperial China. Extremism is always and everywhere a material product of stagnation.

Just as pollution causing climate change is a fact that reasonable people now accept without question, so too is the relationship between stagnation and extremism. One causes the other, as clearly as flood causes the harvest to fail.

Now there is a second question. If stagnation causes extremism, why is extremism still rising in nation like France, where the middle has done better than in the US? The answer is very simple. It isn’t rising nearly to such a degree. Fillon is a conservative, but he is hardly a demagogue. Nor has France been immune to stagnation. While middle incomes have risen, public services have been cut, so real living standards are more or less flat. Thus, we should expect a very simple relationship: the deeper the stagnation, the more the extremism. Societies like France won’t escape it — but nor should we expect that they will be overcome by it, like the US is, and the UK threatens to be. There are degrees.

There is resistance, and there is resistance. There is political resistance. And there is psychological resistance. The political resistance this left hopes to mount is already powerless, is it not? What good has it done so far? Has it actually stopped a single thing? The simple fact is this: this kind of political resistance is devalued to impotence by its very own psychological resistance. Its resistance to reality. What we know — not merely what they wish for.

Now we can think more clearly. I am not saying “racism doesn’t exist”. I am saying that stagnation is like a match, and racism is like spilled gasoline. One is the material cause, the other the moral cause. Therefore, all the above tells us quite the opposite of “racism doesn’t exist”.

Racism is ever present. It is always hidden even in the purest human heart. You have been guilty of it, and I have been guilty of it, no matter our color, race, creed. Let us just admit it now, if we wish to truly heal.

The real question is this: what are we to do with racism? We cannot merely extinguish it by crying “you are bad people!”. Thus absolving ourselves. For that only compels the racist to harden his beliefs, just as it would if I told you you were a bad person. It would activate all your defenses like a nine alarm fire. You would simply try furiously to convince me that you are good, and I am bad, wouldn't you? Psychology explains this to us very clearly. So treating racism as purely a moral phenomenon is profoundly limiting: we are left with nowhere to go when we make the mistake of ignoring empirics, logic, what we really know about bigotry and exremism — that it has a material cause. We are left impotent when we suppose that racism “just is”, because then we cannot unmake it, either.

The great gift of accepting that racism has a material factor which can cause it to explode — stagnation — is that then we can do something about it. Then and only then. If we moralize, we can’t, remember? When we accept that bigotry and hatred are unleashed by despair and frustration, in every human heart — not just “theirs”, but even in ours, should we be so unlucky — then and only then can we begin to act to prevent it, mitigate it, stop it.

That is true justice. True justice. The rarest thing in all the world. It does not come easy, and it does not come often. Let us be wise enough not to squander it this time.

Umair

December 2016