Easily Distracted

I joined in a conversation in Second Life about Obama’s speech in Ghana over the weekend. Due to some technical snafus, I had trouble participating in the panel early on, so one of the basic reactions I had to the speech didn’t really come into play. Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses a good deal of what I was thinking at his blog, though.

It was a fine speech, delivered with Obama’s typically crisp and efficient demeanor. Aside from the historic dimension of the speech being delivered by an African-American President of the United States to an African audience, however, the content was pretty much a tour of contemporary middle-of-the-road orthodoxy concerning African politics and African economic development. I teach a class every three or four years where one of the major themes is African-American encounters with and visions of Africa. Obama’s speech struck me as being pretty far down the list of emotionally and politically momentous episodes in that history, almost a coda rather than a milestone.

Some of that has to do with the content of the speech, which aside from Obama’s discussion of his personal connections to Africa could largely have been delivered by George Bush. I don’t mean that as a critique, I just mean that it was very much a shared governmental perspective steeped in of-the-moment policy initiatives, the Washington Consensus 2.0. Obama didn’t even really take a strong side between some of the contending factions within development circles, instead making little grace gestures towards various pet projects or arguments.

Ta-Nehisi suggests that some of the commentary on the speech saw Obama as more able to scold Africans for their failures in the same way that some prominent African-American spokesmen are allowed to critically address black fatherhood or other issues. Maybe, but the basic message that in the 21st Century, the structural consequences of the colonial era or Cold War geopolitics are less consequential than the internal dynamics of African societies is something you’ll hear from Western politicians across a pretty wide political spectrum. It’s heard as having a different significance, or a different authority, when it’s seen as coming from a racial insider.

I also think, however, that Obama demonstrated that younger political leaders in the African diaspora have less and less of a sense of having travelled through the same historical trials that African leaders of the same generation have experienced. The older generation still has some of the cadences of a pan-African nationalism rolling around in their heads. That imagined sense of a shared project is what produced so many misrecognitions between Africans and African-Americans from the 1960s to the 1980s, but even confusion creates a connection. Even given his personal history, you can feel a distance between the historical evolution of Obama’s political moment in the U.S. and the diverse political moments that many Africans of his generation are experiencing in different nations. Even his father’s involvement in Kenyan nationalism recedes into a prologue to Obama’s journey into an American identity. Which is, again, fine: that’s an ur-narrative of American immigration, which often kicks over the traces and contexts of the political and social histories of the immigrant generation, turning them into heritage rather than ongoing experience.

The upshot, though, is that Obama’s speech struck me as a standard address by a Western leader to Africa that happened to have a big footnote. As far as truly unusual Presidential speeches in Africa go, Bill Clinton’s apology for slavery (to a somewhat bemused audience of Ugandans, a country with little historic connection to the Atlantic slave trade) was more notable.

I’ve been struck in the past week at some of the similarities between Iran and Zimbabwe. Yes, there are vast differences in geopolitical status, economic health, histories of 20th Century statehood, religious and social ideology and much else besides.

But in both places in the last few years, you’ve had some similar kinds of reformist movements that looked to elections as a possible window of opportunity for changing or eroding the power of an authoritarian state elite. Similar in the kinds of claims and strategies they’ve employed, similar in being forced to rely on a figurehead opposition figure whose future commitment to liberal political values is at the least ambiguous. Similar in the social composition of the strongest underlying constituencies pushing for reform: urban populations, educated elites, aspirant cosmopolitans.

And the consequence of both reform campaigns has been broadly similar: to reveal that the state they critique is even less ideological than it appears and that the chief authoritarian or his closest associates is only partially in charge of a state apparatus that has largely been taken over by a silent coup d’etat of securocrats who have connections to paramilitary or irregular forces which draw from different social foundations than the reformers do. And that the securocrats are determined to stay in power regardless, and have the means, lack of scruples and competency to do so, perhaps indefinitely.

Some critics charge that liberals or the left are silent about Iran (or Zimbabwe) because they have a double standard, or even because they have a kind of bizarre sympathetic view of nationalist autocracy in developing nations. I’ve agreed that there’s something to this charge when it comes to Zimbabwe. I don’t feel competent to say the same about Iran. But the substance to this critique strikes me as complicated.

More importantly, there’s another layer of silence that comes from feeling an echo of the same futility and despair that’s clearly affecting reformist actors in Iran or has affected them in Zimbabwe. Beyond saying for the umpteenth time that the upper echelons of state power and securocrat authority in both states are morally contemptible, destructively short-sighted, grotesque, and so on, what’s left to hope for or advocate? Every avenue of international or local action seems played out. The people in control of both states don’t appear likely to allow themselves to be tricked into letting a process of change develop so far that they can’t stop it. They don’t seem to have any interest in the long-term sustainability of their economic or social policies. They seem to have a strong enough internal organization of the state’s capacity for violence that they can’t be challenged effectively by militant or violent action from within. We’ve already seen where most kinds of external intervention lead; even strong diplomatic suasion arguably has a rebound or self-defeating effect in some cases.

Many postcolonial regimes which have organically collapsed from within have done so in many cases because they commanded states with little internal coherence or capacity for directed force, not because they were challenged by strong local social movements, international pressure, or more competent rivals intent on reorganizing and reforming the government. I can think of some important exceptions, but even a few of those seem to me to have given way over time to a recurrence of the same kinds of regimes that they originally displaced.

This is where Iran is a really different kind of case: not contemporary Iran but the beginnings of the current regime. Depressingly similar as it might appear now in its resistance to some kind of liberalization or democratic reform, the current government was the consequence of a pretty genuine bottom-up revolution which gained important traction from international pressures against the Shah’s regime. What I’m struck by, though, is how impossible that kind of successful bottom-up social upheaval against an oppressive state feels to me now, if it is limited to an alliance between urban populations and educated elites. (Which, importantly, the Iranian Revolution was not, though it incorporated those constituencies.) All around the world, it seems to me that states dominated by military or police power have learned how to resist, frustrate, suppress and isolate that kind of transformational pressure from loosely “liberal” constituencies pretty much indefinitely. The only real threat to most regimes are illiberal social and political movements: national or ethnic resistance or religious fundamentalism primarily.

I think a lot of the starry-eyed fetishization of Twitter and other new media in the case of Iran is simply about a hope that a magic technology will come along and make liberal revolution or transformation plausible where social organization has not. As we’ve seen, the technology for organizing smart mobs works for as long as a securocrat state will tolerate it working, and no further. If shutting it off and violently crushing public dissent costs such a state some kind of economic opportunity in the global system, that’s clearly a cost that these states are prepared to pay.

So all of this thinking is also why there’s silence of a kind. Getting up with a bullhorn and declaring one’s outrage slides pretty quickly into self-parody, into a public confession of impotence. Knowing that, what is there to say? I suppose one could get busy with the five-point plans and communiques and various inventories of miniscule carrots and eeny-weeny sticks, but it seems all rather futile. Or, as a lot of blogspheric hot air producers seem to prefer, one could just recycle ire and outrage into wholly domestic attempts to gain miniscule political advantage over local opponents.

About the only thing I can say about Omar Bongo being dead is, “I hope it hurt a bit”. You can’t even say, “Thank goodness that’s over”, because his death won’t change much if anything about the way that the Gabonese state operates.

The fight against corruption in Africa is ebbing, says the New York Times. Not surprising, since much of that fight at the Times sees it has involved a scattering of government officials in isolated departments who were installed in office in part to comply with the vogue for “good governance” in development circles. No matter how dedicated such authorities have been, changing the culture of governmental power and state-society relations is beyond their grasp. The flow of money and power into postcolonial African states from institutional donors, international organizations, outside states seeking influence or resources and companies seeking contracts for extractive enterprise doesn’t really depend on compliance with anti-corruption dictates. Any African elite dependent on that flow knows that the development industry sticks with a particular idea about conditionality for no more than a decade. There are careers to be made off of new policy formations, and past failures are perpetually recuperable as tomorrow’s new and improved approaches.

There is little genuine pressure from below or above within most African societies to change the practice of governance. From below because everyday life is influenced by the state either in the weakest of ways or through dramatic if arbitrary violence. From above because few postcolonial African societies have an elite whose interests stand at a distance from the state: anything that might check or inhibit the state’s ability to extract resources from the global system directly impinges on elites themselves. Look at Gabon. It’s hard to imagine where a serious attempt to transform the social order might come from, save a thin sliver of educated elites with an interest in a more conventionally liberal kind of state, the kind of people who are easy to imprison, intimidate, compromise or exile. Bongo and his associates have had an enhanced ability to buy off any social unrest with oil revenues, but the basic distance between the everyday life of rural and urban people and the attenuated operations of a storefront sovereignty is the same in Gabon as it is across much of the continent.

But it’s also hard to take corruption-fighting ministries too seriously in Africa because as with so many things, what the West imposes on Africa it does not impose upon itself. The bailouts of the last six months are only one example. Corruption is a structural part of the modern state everywhere, not just in Africa. There are big differences in scale (in several respects) between sucking off tax revenues to pay for moat-cleaning in the UK and the Bongo family’s extravagances, but also some strong resemblances.

Everywhere the liberal idea of the state is at least in malaise, if not active crisis. Its problems are old, and so is the conversation about those problems. Is the tendency of modern political classes to become more and more self-aggrandizing a cyclical one that is interrupted and corrected by strong legal and constitutional safeguards, checked and balanced? Or have political elites since 1975, even in relatively liberal and democratic states, become more and more protected from social and political restraints? I tend to think that it’s more the latter than the former despite some notable exceptions and complications. It’s hard to believe that anybody now could have the kind of credulous faith in the nation-state as an administrative or managerial institution that was sometimes expressed earlier in the 20th Century. (Even in dystopian terms: one of the brilliant touches of Gilliam’s film Brazil was that dystopia, too, should be imagined as corrupt and inefficient rather than the perfect machine of Orwell’s envisioning.)

You get a sense of how professional and managerial elites anywhere, not just Gabon, struggle with their relationship to the political classes, by watching the punditry coming out of the UK in the last week. Look at the fatuous tone of the Economist in the past week, for example. Much tut-tutting about the horrible misjudgement of British parliamentarians, and wishing for the stables to be swept clean of all the muck. But also fretting about how it would be a bad thing to hold an election where the expense accounts were the main issue, much concern that a freakshow side-tent might become the center ring. That’s not the Economist alone: you can find echoes of that double-gesture in punditry left and right.

In fact, that’s a realistic response in some sense, because there are no untainted parties to vote for that are not otherwise tainted by their ideology–and besides, given how systematic the abuses of the current political class are, why should anyone suppose that fringe parties would not quickly find ways to spend public funds on their own follies?

The taint runs deeper too than elected officials and bureaucratic elites, whether we’re talking the UK, the US, Gabon or anywhere else you care to name. If the fury that people feel is curiously unlikely to be more than fuel for conversational righteousness over a pint or two, it’s because most folk know that few of us are more than a few degrees separated from practices and behavior that some pitiless observer might name as corrupt, and few of us are more than a few degrees distant from some kind of largesse distributed by the state or by equally powerful civic institutions. I remember a conversation in a decaying post-industrial small city in New England a few years back. One woman I was talking with had just retired from nursing. She bitterly complained about African-American “welfare cheats” but then ten minutes later talked about how she got a doctor to falsely attest that she was looking for work so that she could claim unemployment benefits, which she felt was her right. It’s always the other guy, but it’s hard to think of a way to stop the other guy that doesn’t create a new bridge for bureaucrat-trolls to hide under and demand some price from those who want to clip-clop across it.

But how could there be a better or more powerful basis for voting in the UK than the expense-account scandal? Those who counsel that an election should be fought over “real issues” are missing the point. None of the real issues matter if you’re voting for a political class that cares little for delivering anything meaningful on those issues. (If you promise “change”, that had better not stop with “not appointing flaming incompetents to positions of authority”.) How else can political classes be made to feel the murmur of a threat to their position if there are no consequences for systematic misrule? How can we recognize the distributed costs of corruption to our human possibilities if not by making corruption the center of public attention?