John Launer: Making sense of our times

These are grim times, when the global political landscape of our era is dissolving. Under Donald Trump’s second presidency, the United States is swinging rapidly towards isolationism and autocracy. Some accounts in the mainstream media still make current events seem like a variant of business as usual or a form of entertainment. They are not.

The London based health researcher Christina Pagel has mapped out recent developments in the US against three domains that characterise authoritarian rule: control of science to align with state ideology; undermining the independence of universities; and maintaining geopolitical and economic goals.1 Pagel says that key parts of US science and medicine are being toppled. She makes comparisons with other autocracies, including Stalin’s Russia and modern Hungary and Iran. Taken together, these developments dwarf our travails in the NHS, although they will no doubt affect these indirectly before long.

If you’re trying to make sense of all of this, you’re not alone. Along with Pagel, I would recommend reading two highly ranked international commentators who are trying to explain events using other historical parallels. One is Robert Reich, a US lawyer and President Obama’s former labour secretary. He likens the beliefs among Trump’s circle to social Darwinism in the 19th century.2 The wealthiest people in society at the time believed that life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest would survive. Reich quotes the political philosopher William Graham Sumner, who then dominated American social thought. “Millionaires,” Sumner argued, “are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done . . . They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Trump and the billionaires around him seem to believe the same about themselves. Poorer citizens, in their view, can not only go to the wall—they deserve to.

Another informative commentator is Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, who looks back even further in history. He claims that we’ve now moved into an economic system he calls “techno-feudalism.”3 He likens this to medieval feudalism, where aristocrats literally owned the serfs who tilled their land to generate wealth. Varoufakis points out how tech companies now control our information, minds, and behaviour in a similar way, allowing those companies to generate unimaginably large profits. They’re not only willing, but keen, to sacrifice democracy to increase their wealth even more.

Whether or not you find such historical parallels helpful, the regression to atavistic economic systems is frightening. We face global existential threats, including climate catastrophe and the escalating risk of nuclear conflict. Trump and his coterie of oligarchs are pursuing an alternative strategy based on denial and private aggrandisement. The more they run from the realities, the more likely they are to hasten them. Whether we’re doctors, scientists, or ordinary citizens, we need to be clear sighted about what’s going on—and to engage in whatever forms of protest and resistance to authoritarianism we can find the courage to muster.