The US: Last Prisonhouse of Orientalism

One of the most striking effects of the Arab Spring has been the media-intensive demolition of the three most prevalent tropes of First World Orientalism. The first is the trope of the docile comprador elite, incarnated by Tunisia's Ben Ali. The second is the trope of the US-bankrolled military leader, epitomized by Egypt's Mubarak. And the third is the occasionally spiteful (but ultimately acquiescent to neoliberal capital) dictator-plutocrat, immemorialized by Libya's Qaddafi.

All three went down in flaming wreckage. The first barely escaped an arrest order by hopping on a plane, the second is in jail, and the third is being hunted down like the low-rent gangster he always was. While the fall of the tyrants has been predictably electrifying on the Middle Eastern region -- several other countries are now in revolutionary ferment -- one of the most intriguing and paradoxical effects of the Arab Spring has been its transformation of the American political unconscious.

This political unconscious did not watch the Arab Spring with joy. Strange as it may sound, it watched with a trepidation tinged with sorrow. Not sorrow for the fallen dictators, but for the fall of the US Empire.

There are good reasons for this. For one thing, the US has been a society in crisis since the 1980s. Faced with the structural decline of its military-industrial empire in the face of overseas competitors, US elites chose a strategy of aggressive speculation and imperial revanchism called neoliberalism. As the decades passed, the scope of neoliberalism's speculation and revanchism kept increasing, and became flagrantly self-destructive.

Neoliberalism was afflicted with a reverse Midas touch: everything it touched eventually blew up in its own face, only with compound interest. 1980s union-busting turned into 1990s deindustrialization and eventually 2000s economic suicide. Likewise, the $400 billion S&L debacle was followed by the $1 trillion dotcom bubble and bust, and finally the $14 trillion (yes, it really was this big, see Nomi Prins for the gory details) securitization and housing bubble, whose implosion nearly melted the world economy. Conversely, counterinsurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Nicaragua turned into regional wars and IMF structural adjustment campaigns in the 1990s, and finally full-scale invasions of Central Asia in the early 2000s.

Adding to the crisis, the US Empire lost its most useful counterplayer, the USSR, in 1991. Ever since then, US elites have been casting about for a substitute for the fiction of the Soviet colossus in order to legitimate their rule. Muslim-bashing and the Terror War were final, desperate attempts to resuscitating the moldering corpses of the Communist boogeyman and the Cold War, and now the Arab Spring has obliterated even these pathetic excuses.

What the Arab Spring symbolizes, above all, is the popular rebellion against neoliberal plutocracy. The message to American citizens is clear: if you don't want plutocrats to despoil your country, you'll have to protest like a Tunisian, walk like an Egyptian, and fight like a Libyan.