Week 7: Traditionalism, Capitalism, Neoliberalism and the Global Environmental Wake-Up Call

Dear all,

A sound of long-distance artillery. Rhythmic, deaf sounds of incoming shells. The sound that follows when they hit the target, more like a loud whisper. The long-distance shelling of sustainable transition and all the things that would enable, even remotely tangible, improvements on this planet in terms of the mitigation of the growing climate emergency, inequality, and inclusion are nowadays shots at close range. Hand grenades are thrown into hopes, expectations, and in some cases already agreed laws and regulations. Commitments are broken, pledges revoked, dignity sold. Market liberal democracies are capitulating under the weight of their own failures and promises (many empty) made over the course of the last 80 years.

We should not allow ourselves to be distracted because we usually are, from where we are heading or what is really at stake. Dismantling action on sustainable transition, the fight to tackle climate change, and increasing inequality in western democracies are collateral damage of something bigger and far more dangerous happening right now in the world. Five years ago, this was long-distance shelling, yet predictable and somehow manageable to navigate, now it is at our doorsteps, and we should really try to understand what we are dealing with. Those hoping to understand what the world might currently be up against should know more about traditionalist ideas shaping current world dynamics more than ever before.

A form of “enlightened capitalism” defined western political economies from the second world war until roughly the downfall of the Soviet Union. This type of capitalism was predicated on the Judeo-Christian tradition, which was, according to traditionalists, adequately able to represent the culture and economic interests of the working classes. However, increasing secularization in the West eroded that tradition, according to traditionalists. This set the stage by the 1990s for enlightened capitalism to be supplanted by a new form of political economy, namely neoliberalism.

The defining feature of neoliberalism involves the establishment of an international class of political and corporate elites, the “Davos party,” who presumably lack the values necessary to represent the economic and cultural interest of anyone else besides themselves. What is driving the populist movement and its frontal attack on liberal democracies is, according to traditionalists like Steve Bannon, primarily a reaction to neoliberalism. And very much failed such. In its original form, traditionalism regards the nation-state as a product of modernity, a more confined space for the eradication of hierarchy and the imposition of homogeneity.