Maybe it’s just me. But 2018 already feels like a strange, dislocating year. At first I thought it was the sheer nervous exhuastion of 2017, colliding suddenly with a new year, which is supposed to be full of hope and freedom. Then I thought that maybe it was saturation with dystopia, a constant and relentless stream of bad news. But neither of these really got to the heart of how my odd combination of feelings — not dread, worry, and alarm, anymore, but a weird kind of absence of them. Like we’re out of history altogether somehow, stuck in some kind of anomaly, bubble, or capsule.

It feels to me, I thought at last, more like an eerie, ominous calm. The kind that might rise early one morning over a meadow which is to see a historic battle as soon as the day breaks. A calm that is pregnant with a coming tsunami.

Now. What do I mean by all this? That we are in a strange position in the world today. The answers to the problems that surround us are obvious, to any reasonable person — but here we are, waiting to see how are they to be expressed, enacted, and constructed, and whether they can be. We are a world in limbo, in purgatory, this year, standing still, waiting, holding our breath, wondering if we should dare to hope again. But only ghosts really live in limbo.

Let me unpack all that, because maybe it is not clear, using the example of America, though I think it applies to many places today. “The answers are obvious, to any reasonable person”: the vast majority of Americans are such people. 70% or so by most measures, know precisely what is to be done to fix an ailing society — they support working healthcare, education, transport, finance, childcare, opportunity, stability, mobility, and so on. There is a widespread hunger for a better social contract that redefines the common good in America.

And yet society is captive to a fringe — the 20 or 30% or so of Americans that would be very happy seeing a stone-age society arise again, not quite understanding, or perhaps unconsciously hoping, they themselves would suffer terribly, too. Now. Why is America captive to this fringe? Do the 30% stand at the 70%’s doors, locked and loaded? Of course not.

So there must be a deeper problem here. What might it be? Well, American elites, a word I don’t like to use — leaders, politicians, pundits, and so on — are on the side of the 30%, the extremist fringe, by omission or comission, especially when they don’t vehemently deny they ever could be. Liberal pundits, for example, who never once mention simply copying British or French or Spanish healthcare systems, though they might not appear to side with the 30%, do precisely that by omission: they simply refuse to see reality, whether it is that those systems work, or that 70% of Americans support them. The same is true for political parties — one offers Mad Max capitalism, the other offers Hunger Games capitalism — but neither offers the 70% what they so obviously and clearly want.

So America has a profund and very real problem of radical centrism, that has made the people ghosts, invisible, unseen, denied, ignored. The center simply refuses to budge, to move, even though placing a political center at that point no longer represents the will of the people in any way whatsoever.

The radical centrists — economists who’ve never studied anything but capitalism, intellectuals who’ve never learned the world exists, superstar journalists who refuse to question it all—only dig themselves more deeply into their foxholes the moment anyone asks, “Hey! Why don’t you guys ever want any kind of change?” Their answer is always an adolescent form of denial, which preserves their own self-image of worthiness and success, that goes something like: “change? Who needs change! Things are great!!” They have to make themselves blind: anything else, after all, would be to have to admit a kind of failure. But in exactly this way, radical centrism has become America’s great stumbling block to creating a working society, economy, or culture once again.

(Now, I don’t merely appeal to naive populism — we can easily ask, “well, is the will of the people worthy of being expressed?” And the answer is yes: better healthcare and education and so on, don’t trample on minorities, they don’t harm the long-term common good, and they don’t punish the vulnerable, the three key tests of whether a will of the people is democratic, or simply fealty to authoritarianism. In this case, in modern America, the will of the people is in rude health. It is something else in society that has gone rotten — and that thing is the radical center.)

America’s real problem is not that the people have failed to shape or form the right will — one that is democratic, one that is legitimate, and one that is wise. It is that that will is not able to be expressed, enacted, and constructed, because the radical center is making democracy impossible. There are multiple layers of institutional failure standing in the way of a healthy will of the people — political parties, media, intellectuals, and so on, all of whom do not seem to be able to think as carefully about society or the future as the average American him or herself can. Or do not care to — because they have been corroded.

Do you see the tragic, weird, absurdity of all this? It is a society of ghosts versus a handful of blind men. The ghosts cannot touch the blind men, even though they shout, “wake up!!”, and the blind men cannot see the ghosts. Yet all the while, society balances on a razor’s edge, sure to topple one way or another. How funny. How strange.

So here we are, ghosts stuck in purgatory, in limbo. The key test of this year: can the radical center be moved, toppled, dislodged, shifted? How? We know what is to be done: rewrite the social contract. But the people are opposed, the sensible ones, at least, not just by the fringe — but by the very radical, immovable center which supposes that it opposes the lunatic fringe, but is in fact in a kind of strange, unholy alliance with them, by making any concession to possibility impossible. They cannot see the ghosts, remember?

Limbos and purgatories are strange places to be, precisely because they ask us to hope beyond hope that one day we will not be ghosts. No one can really be not sure: will this be the year that we come back to life? Let us say only, then, this much: better to open one’s eyes, and see where one stands, than stay blind, like those who pretend a society, alone among all things in existence, can stay the hand of change — which is all that things have ever been.

Umair

January 2018