| 10 mins read
Anya Pearson interviews Professor Helen Thompson, an expert on geopolitics and political economy, on global disorder and Trump's re-election. In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century , Thompson explains the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s and shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies. A Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, Thompson also produces a political podcast called 'These Times' with Tom McTague.
There's so much in your book Disorder about the structural forces behind today's geopolitical chaos. I found it really hard to just pick one subject to ask you about, because it's all intertwined. But firstly, why did you write Disorder, and can you summarize its core arguments?
My first conception of the book was in summer of 2018. I wanted to get away from short-term analysis of Brexit and Trump in particular. And I also thought that the failed coup in Turkey in July of 2016 was a much underrated moment in terms of the turbulence of that year. As I started writing, I got it down to three stories. One geopolitical, predominantly about energy. One economic, quite a lot about energy. And one about democratic politics, a little bit about energy. That's when I started to think that energy was the unifying thread. I didn't want to write a book that was energy determinist, but I did end up writing a more materialist book than I had originally intended with the aim of trying to explain. My overall argument in the book I ending up writing was that we are are living through a period of systematic turbulence in which Brexit and Trump were some of the symptoms.
You say in your book you want to `’privilege the schematic over forensic detail”. What are the disadvantages and advantages of doing this? And how do you counter the disadvantages?
That's a good question. I think the advantages of doing it were that I could give a long history, as opposed to provide a relatively short historical context. I could have, for instance, started everything in the 1990s but I didn't think that the 90s is, in the big scheme of things, such an important juncture. So I started the geopolitics story with the rise of oil as an energy source at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. I started the economic story in the 1970s, because there’s a succession of different economic crises, and the beginnings of China's integration into the world economy. I started the democratic story with the beginnings of representative democratic politics in the United States at the end of the 18th century.
The advantage was that I could be quite flexible. Not everything starts in the same place – I just try to tell a unified story around each theme. A disadvantage is that there are bits of the story missing. For example, I downplay the significance of the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine about the transit of gas prior to 2014 that turns out to be very consequential by 2022 when the hard back was published and needed for the paperback epilogue. When you're dealing with a long time period, even things that are very pertinent can't have as much space as they need.
Another disadvantage comes out in the way that I treated Brexit, which appears in three different stories, the geopolitical, the economic and the democratic. I've not given one straightforward explanation, I've baked in that it's got a long term explanation by the structure of the book. It means that I'm not really testing out my Brexit interpretation against others, because I've not included everything.
What did you hope to achieve with the book as a whole, and what do you feel its impact has been so far?
I wanted to show just how central energy is to understanding the political world in which we live. That became my primary intellectual ambition. The book was published in the UK on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. In a difficult way, my arguments, that might have seemed, I think, odd to people who hadn't thought very much about energy, had almost instant plausibility.
Let’s turn now to the US election. How do you think the USA got into this position?
In Disorder, I tried to give an account for the 2016 election that looked at the implications of the dilution of American nationhood as a political idea, and one that showed the ways in which, paradoxically, the American shale boom coming after the failure of the Iraq War, and at the same time as China had taken a turn after the crash, and particularly then when Xi Jinping came in, had reintroduced a set of geopolitical dilemmas into American electoral politics. I thought there was a way of seeing the 2016 election as not so much Clinton versus Trump, but in geopolitical terms; a ‘confront China’ candidate versus a ‘confront Russia’ candidate. Domestically, American nationhood had disappeared as any kind of unifying force.
If we then think about this election, the Biden administration actually took one of those premises that I had articulated; that you had to understand Trump's success in context of the deindustrialization of America in relation to China's rise. The Biden premise was that there was a class base to Trump's success that was tied to the decline of American manufacturing, and that the way to provide the bulwark against a future Trump presidency was the reindustrialization of America through the Inflation Reduction Act, creating manufacturing jobs with higher wages. But that strategy – even if it's going to succeed in the long term (which I think is open to question) – didn't have quick benefits, and then it ran into the problems of global inflation, which was fundamentally about energy, both in relation to gas for Europe in 2021 and oil prices for the United States in 2022. It made it near impossible for any incumbents from that that time to get re-elected. That seems to me quite a vindication of my claim that energy is acting as a disruptive force throughout Western politics.
Having said that, I think you have to have some analysis that's more particular to the American electoral cycle: Biden promising to be a one-term president, then saying he was going to run again, then being removed; the installation of Harris at short notice; Harris's weakness as a candidate; the fact that the Biden administration decided not to respond to the border issue.
Can I ask you about election interference? How likely was it, or should we just simply rule it out?
If you wanted one piece of evidence that suggests that this is about the unpopularity of an incumbent administration, it would be that an exit poll found 70% of Americans said the country was moving in the wrong direction. You don't need to reach for other explanations when you've got something like that.
What is your prediction for the survival of democratic politics in the US and elsewhere?
American democracy is in some trouble. It's quite fortunate that the election wasn't close because it makes losers’ consent a lot easier. The third part of Disorder talks about how losers’ consent has been breaking down in American politics since the 1990s. We should think about the attempted impeachment of Clinton in those terms, as well as in 2016 with the Russiagate investigation of Trump, and in relation to the events of 6 January 2021.
It's difficult for democratic politics to have political stability if you have highly polarized societies. We can already see how unpopular the Labour government has become, because the same difficulties remain in place, and so then the electorate, or enough of it, projects onto Reform as an alternative in the same way as it did from the Conservative government onto Labour. The electorate wants a government that does something differently than the one that's in power, but the political classes don't know what that is, or how to do that. The day after the American election the German coalition effectively came to an end. That kind of governmental collapse is not supposed to happen in German politics, but this government has fallen apart because it hasn't got a way of dealing in a coherent manner with the set of problems that Germany is facing. The sheer difficulty of governing in present economic, geopolitical and political conditions leads to democratic instability. It's a structural force at work.
