Milei’s Fever Dreams

The debates about Zionism and colonialism that have exploded everywhere in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel are confounding to those who grew up believing that Zionism is an ideology of liberation and self-determination. Yet, in its success at creating the state of Israel, Zionism became something fundamentally different than it had been in its origins, though there are key differences between Israeli Jews and other colonial states, including that the settlers had “a historical memory of indigenous origin” and “that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return.”

“Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a ‘decolonization’ that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice.”

In this article, Larsen critiques Walter Mignolo’s “decoloniality” concept, arguing that it fails to address colonialism’s historical and material aspects. He suggests that Mignolo’s focus on cultural and ethnic hierarchies overlooks detailed historical references and struggles against neocolonialism. The critique, from a Marxist perspective, highlights the shortcomings of decoloniality’s rejection of universality and its implicit endorsement of non-Western capitalist states. The popularity of Mignolo’s work is seen as reflecting the Global South’s experiences but questions its theoretical depth and political efficacy.

“In all the iterations of Mignolo’s high-visibility theorizing … the allegedly subversive, de-Westernizing thrust of what is now an officially trademarked decoloniality is traced back to a point long predating the near-contemporary inception of its jargon. Its origins purportedly go all the way back to the beginnings of the European penetration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas, Africa, and southern and eastern Asia in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. As such, what is claimed to be the subversive power of contemporaneous decoloniality is already said to reside in an indigenous, non-European decolonial resistance—a resistance to which Europe’s first colonial exploits assuredly did give rise. Whatever the truth and whatever the terminology currently affixed to and projected back onto them, the social and political legacy and importance of such historical struggles are often ignored and underplayed. But in lieu of their deeper historical analysis, what prevails in Mignolo’s work is what I will refer to as the mere jargon of decoloniality, often descending into outright bombast.”

Afropessimism, as defined by a new generation of U.S. scholars over the past decade, has come to refer to the systemic oppression of Black people in the United States. “In the words of Frank Wilderson, who has positioned himself as one of its leading exponents, Afropessimism refers to the notion that ‘Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness.’” But Afropessimist theorists ignore historical and geographical differences in racial discrimination, internationally and even within the United States.

“Afropessimism is an exclusivist brand of race primordialism. It is primordialist in that it sees race—or, rather, blackness as uniquely institutionalized in the United States and then universalized with a stroke of the pen—as foundational to being, knowledge and power; as permanent, pervasive and impossible to dislodge from its role as structural mooring and existential pivot.”

“Afropessimism is not a theory so much as a mood coalescing in the hangover from the Obama years and a paradoxical expression of the yearning of the African American cultural bourgeoisie for black solidarity, be it negative, made more tenuous by upward class mobility or inheritance. It offers a rhetorical radicalization of racial nihilism in the face of shifting yet enduring black oppression that leads straight to political abdication. It is ironic and revealing that Afropessimism would thrive in the academy and seduce college-educated black millennials at the very moment when Black Lives Matter, the most significant movement of black mobilization since the Civil Rights Movement, surged in the streets, challenging the premises of white rule across the gamut of American institutions, starting with the university. Ultimately, Afropessimism flounders because it denies the varieties of blackness and the historicity of racial domination that have been demonstrated time and again—first and foremost by the long string of hard-fought victories of black struggles for dignity in America, Africa and beyond.”

“The problem with neoliberalism in the United States is not simply that taxes are too low or billionaires are too greedy or corporations are too ‘globalist,’ but that neoliberal modes of wealth accumulation are increasingly undermining the economic, political and security conditions on which they rely. It is precisely these issues that have motivated a rethinking of neoliberal orthodoxy, among both elite and popular constituencies, yet these problems are rarely discussed in these precise terms, and post-neoliberalism struggles to find an established constituency.”

The established partisan frameworks are inadequate for the challenges of the “supposedly emerging new paradigm” dubbed “post-neoliberalism,” and “U.S. economic strategy, cultural debates and foreign policy all remain trapped in an uneasy interregnum.”

“Lurking behind America’s economic and foreign policy confusion are larger shifts in partisan orientation and ambition. After decades of neoliberal depoliticization, basic assumptions about the nature of democratic politics—that the goal is to build large majorities with the aim of wielding government power to implement a coherent policy agenda for public benefit—no longer seem operative.”

Hannah Arendt argued that loneliness is the necessary precursor to totalitarianism, a perspective that situates the crisis of contemporary American loneliness in a chilling context. Yet, “despite the sometimes vicious permutations of American loneliness … America still has not plumbed the weird depths that the fusion of its politics with its loneliness could lead.”

“In the erosive capitalism with a caring face that prevails in a declining American republic, there is no consensus on what is good, and many people are lost. In these troubled American woods, populism—on the right and on the left—is contemporary America’s offering to a country of lonely people who want passionately to believe that they are truly not alone. (So ardent is this desire to feel not alone that alleged sightings of UFOs in America exceed that in any other country; the Pentagon has even established its own office devoted to tracking possible interplanetary friends.) Hatred is the quickest kind of intimacy, and populism’s fevers consist of powerful aversions that have the effect of binding the hater to the object of their hatred.”