They can’t permute their reps---their crisis rhetoric masks American hypocrisy and deflects from sustained critique

But the story of crisis language in the twentieth-century is more complicated than that. When Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institute, pleaded with his readers just before the election to understand that we are “forty-eight hours away from a new world crisis” he did so in order to stress how rare the moment was, how singular the threat, and how urgent the need to defeat Trump. “World crises,” he argued, “are rare. They occur when a fault-line opens up in the international system that generates enormous instability and unleashes powerful opposing forces with no means of reconciling them.”¶ And yet, while “world crises” in these exact, global terms may be rare, the way Wright uses the idea is not. Indeed, those of us who study the discursive traditions attached to British and American forms of liberal imperialism over the last one hundred years know that crisis language – the kind that positions the “indispensable” imperial nation as perennially on the brink, always the only thing sewing together the fabric of the universe – has a long and ignoble history.¶ Claims that liberal values and Western Civilization are in immediate danger of decline are simply how liberals with an interest in rationalizing the continuing hegemonic/imperial power of their states imagine the movement of time. They are as common as air. Because at the very heart of the liberal imperial project lies a bundle of deeply unsettling and irreconcilable ideological contradictions that all cluster around one central, gnawing hypocrisy: how can an immensely powerful, heavily militarized state, that claims to be grounded on the ideals of freedom, democracy, and a respect for sovereign autonomy consistently deny those very ideals to vast swaths or the world’s population and still be liberal? This is the primal ideological wound that never fully heals, the discursive disconnect that requires constant rhetorical managing primarily by encouraging people to look elsewhere – anywhere – but at the contradiction. The idea of crisis, therefore, lies at the core of this liberal imperial politics of deflection. It is a key weapon in the rhetorical arsenal.¶ For instance, just before World War One and at the height of British imperial power, worried pro-imperial, liberal pundits associated with the Roundtable Society – shortly thereafter to become the Royal Society of International Affairs (Chatham House) whose members would play a not-insignificant role in helping to found the Council on Foreign Relations in America in 1921 – produced countless memoranda, journal articles, and papers fretting over the demise of the liberal world order, the dangerous waves of Indian laborers marauding through the Commonwealth, and the relentless rise of an ever expanding China.¶ Nearly one hundred years later, liberal internationalist scholar Ikenberry – who uses the word “crisis” in the titles of his published work perhaps more than any other IR scholar writing today – has made strikingly similar observations about the threat posed to the liberal international order by rising powers, particularly China. The clarifying logic at work for liberal British imperialists then, and contemporary supporters of America’s hegemony now, is always the same: “If not us, then who? China? Russia? Come on, really? At this moment of crisis, you’re going to choose them?” In the long twentieth-century of liberal imperialism – British and American – the idea of crisis looms so large that it blocks out the sun.¶ Again, my point in highlighting the ways members of the foreign policy establishment – Democrats and Republicans, liberal internationalists, realists, and neocons alike – participate in occluding the fact of American empire through their use of crisis language is not meant to suggest that there isn’t something profoundly troubling about the rise of Donald Trump. Nor am I implying that opposing fascism is not our primary responsibility as citizens and activists in this new era. Rather, I want to suggest that, in the long and brutal fight against Trumpism that is to come, we resist the temptation to let liberal imperialism off the hook for the sake of concentrating solely on the greater evil. Because when Democrats and Republicans insist again and again that the United States is a liberal hegemon, or an “indispensable nation,” or a democratic super power, or a reluctant world leader – anything other than an empire – what alternative to empire are we left with?¶ And if empire is the only thing we can ever expect, all the way down, then Trump and fascism are always going to be possibilities; they lie there, just below the thin surface of the “liberal, rules based order,” waiting to break through. We need to ask ourselves how, in this environment bristling with silences, misdirection, and deflection, we can create the space where another world becomes possible. The success of the Sanders movement in this country suggests that such alternative accounts of political life not only exist but have enormous popular support if only we can wrest them from the liberal crises that perennially narrow the aperture of our political vision.¶ The struggle now must be to tie a critique of liberal deflection on a domestic level with the fight against empire globally. That fight requires collective humility and sustained reflection on America’s role in the world. In other words, it requires forging the kinds of critiques, countermemories, and counternarratives that, in the words of Edward Said, “will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep.”