The Magic of the White Progressor: From Global Cargo Cult to a New Political Normality

Abstract

The value and institutional core, which legitimized the historical rise and global domination of the West, is increasingly becoming the object of criticism. The initial coordinates of the liberal consensus, which promised humanity a constant rise in the living standards and opportunities thanks to the universality of the models of self-regulating markets and liberal democracies, find themselves under a revision. The background global trends, including those that unfolded in the Western societies, demonstrate the opposite — stagnation or shrinking of the resource base of the majority of the population against the background of the radicalization of economic inequali ty, corporate game that includes “shorting” the cost of labor (global uberization), the formation of elite democracies with limited access that ignore the principles of equality and interests of the majority. As a result, values, practices and institutions that were previously viewed as pathological deviations, institutional traps and something archaic (backwardness), consistently transform into a new global normality. Thus, theories that describe the contours of the global future mainly in non-market, and sometimes in illiberal categories, are gai ning momentum. These theories document new formats for the distribution of public resources, which are not based on markets and democracy, but rather on rent mechanisms, redistributive political regulation and differentiated value for the state of different social groups. The authors argue that, from the economic standpoint, the emerging new normality is associated with the unfolding consensus that citizens are entitled to the basic political rent or other forms of differentiated access to resources that can provide them with decent existence in the face of the gro wing inefficiency of market communications. From the political standpoint, the new normality manifests itself in the potential communitarian turn, based on a set of left-wing, nationalist and populist discourses, united by the resentment idea of returning to the state (which distributes resources) a key role in regula ting radical inequalities in the interests of the majority.