Old power, new power

Sometimes, after a long and mostly successful struggle, rebels don't know what to do when the bad guys change.

In the history of the modern world, liberals have been the rebels. It was liberals who strove to limit the power of previously unchallenged institutions - churches, states, and corporations. It was liberals who first challenged the age-old assumption that race = destiny. It was liberals who fought for the poor, the marginalized, and the disadvantaged.

But the forward-looking among liberals always had to have imagined a time when these institutions would finally totter and fall (as all institutions do), and a new set of powers would emerge and threaten to repress the human spirit. Did they then imagine that the liberal movement would vanish into the mists of irrelevance, having fulfilled its reason for existence by slaying its longtime enemies? Or did they believe that liberalism is defined by more than who it fights against, and that liberalism would thus take up arms against any and all villainous newcomers?

What happens when the Catholic Church, imperial Western nations, and big corporations are no longer the Big Dogs? Do we put down our pens and turn on South Park?

I'm asking this because, though the day of the Changing of the Big Dogs is not yet at hand, it's hard to deny that it's drawing closer and closer. Let's go through a quick list.

1. Europe
Though Europe is still rich (in per-capita terms), the Old Empires constitute a smaller percentage of world population every year. Their economies are in decline, their political systems are stagnant, and their populations are either declining or flat. The 1800s are gone, and they aren't coming back.

2. Corporations
Where big businesses once ruled whole towns and could command near-infinite overtime, U.S. companies are now straining to stay afloat in the breakneck sprint of global competition. GM, titan of titans, is so weighed down by its ossified bureaucracy and the burdens placed on it by its powerful unions that it's heading for bankruptcy. Corporations are still huge, but (with a couple exceptions like Wal-Mart) they've lost most of their "market power," so that when pressured they often just collapse.

3. Christianity
When was the last time a war was launched in the name of Christianity? Though many in the U.S. see the Southern Baptist Diocese as a stand-in for the repressive Catholic Church of yore, it's hard to argue with the fact that Christianity has mellowed. Even America's "Third Great Awakening" - the religious revival that began twenty-five years ago - hasn't had people up in arms or stopped (for instance) gays from moving toward equal rights.

4. America
While Europe's decline is indisputable, it's hard to escape the nagging perception that America isn't far behind. With a loss of economic competitiveness, a military defeat in Iraq, an economy whose only source of growth is housing prices, fractured political leadership, and the opinion of the world solidly against it, the U.S. is not looking like the colossus it was just 7 years ago. While this country will remain a superpower into the next century (our big population, open economy, and stash of nukes will see to that), the idea of America as "leader of the world" may already have fallen by the wayside.

So the old power centers that liberalism fought to reform are looking like they're on pretty shaky legs. But have new powers risen up in the world to take their place? A few years ago, I would have said no, but it now seems increasingly clear that there are two big new kids on the block: radical Islam, and the Russia-China alliance.

Islam itself is the fastest-growing religion in the world, increasingly leaving Christianity in the dust. What's more, it's hard to argue with the notion that Islam around the world is growing increasingly radicalized, with Puritan strains like Wahhabism and Salafism taking over from traditionally more spiritual, inward-looking varieties. The world's current religious wars are nearly all being waged in the name of Islam. Radical Muslims are torching girls' schools in Afghanistan, massacring Christians in Indonesia, and marching against newspapers' right to print cartoons. Majority-Muslim states routinely ban and oppress minority religions (have any majority-Christian states done this within living memory?). The worst oppression of women's rights on Earth can be found in conservative Islamic societies.

While I'd never try to argue that Islam is inherently worse or more violent than Christianity or any other religion (they all go through periods of Puritanical violence and periods of progressive moderation), I find myself unable to escape the conclusion that most of the Puritan power in the world is currently coming from organized movements within Islam.

And as for the Russian-Chinese alliance, also known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, this generally anti-US alliance is made up of countries with nearly five times the population, nearly the same GDP (and growing faster), and more nukes than NATO. And as the liberal UK newspaper The Guardian puts it, the SCO is largely a club for dictators:

Few may yet have heard of [the SCO]. But out of the east comes a radically different paradigm for 21st-century international organisation, short on idealism and long on hard-headed self-interest. The "universal" principles of "liberty, democracy and justice" lauded by [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair are hardly its driving force.

Although this group is not yet calling the shots worldwide (who needs to when you're more than half the world already), the steady economic rise of non-democratic, non-Western states whould give pause to liberals who've spent their political careers fighting to reform Western democracies.

In their day, white European imperialists conquered the world, massacred millions, and subjugated billions, all in the name of Jesus. And along the way they also developed incredible life-improving technology, invented modern democracy and human rights, and created big pockets of peace and stability. It was largely due to the efforts of liberal reformers that the West's better nature eventually (mostly) won out over its demons.

But it's a new world, a new millennium. We've got to think about whether the struggle against Puritanism fades when Christian Puritanism fades, or whether we should carry on the struggle against the similar forces now present in the Islamic world. We've got to decide whether we should try to curb the authority of superpower nations, even when those nations are not our own (and are more likely than our own nations to have us unceremoniously dragged out and shot for opening our mouths). As the West and its institutions settle in for a long decline, we've got to decide if liberalism has something to say about a world ruled by the East.

For my part, I believe that liberalism is an enduring idea, which draws upon a strong historical foundation to offer a universal, not Western, critique of human institutions.

Or, less poetically:

I don't know about all you guys, but I'm not going to stop fighting when the enemy rotates its roster.