Some people will point to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others will point to Lee Atwater’s embrace of neo-Confederacy for George Herbert Walker Bush, or the 1994 midterms, or the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Or maybe September 11, 2001.
But for my money, the Third World War began on the seventh of September, 2015, when the third reading of the Brexit referendum bill passed the House of Commons in Great Britain. From that point, the UK had placed a loaded gun to its temple, setting the stage for the first major battle of the war: the Brexit referendum. The second major battle was lost in the United States on 9 November 2016, when Hillary Clinton conceded defeat to a man who had received fewer votes. You can then look at India or Brazil, Hungary and Poland, and then look at the strike back in the United States in November 2020 – and then at the renewed offensive campaign that started on 6 January 2021 and has continued ever since, all the way to Ottawa for the last month.
Because this world war isn’t between nation states or ideological blocs of like minded countries. It’s a battle of ideology, a dozen cold civil wars of establishment versus populism, all with a common thread: the rejection of modernity, of globalization, of the idea that we in any way have to consider the existence of the world outside our door. It’s a rejection of climate change, a rejection of free trade, an embrace of homophobia and religious bigotry and racism and violent nationalism, a mindless barbaric yawp of asserting, as WJ Cash said, “that no man living could tell him what to do and get away with it.”
It’s powered by the Internet, fed with foreign money from aspirational great powers who don’t need to defeat America if they can merely drag her down to their level, and embraced by those who see it as a ready source of votes and outrage and ignorance that can be weaponized in defense of the status quo – or, if needed, to turn back the clock, or guarantee that one side can assure their continued political power in the face of demographics and democracy. You can see from here that the Republican aspiration is a country that looks like Hungary, where the courts are tame and the press is compliant and the opposition can be harassed out of puissance in the name of God and family and traditional values.
It’s what drives Xi Jinping thought, it’s what Putin has relied on for years, it’s got India in a hammerlock under Modi, it’s in Brazil – until Biden was elected, it was the governing ideology of literally half the ten largest countries in the world, and America’s democrats – small d chosen deliberately – are on the ropes and struggling to hang on in the face of Southern states determined to rig the vote and packed federal courts determined to allow them to do it. And it’s not hard to see where it leads. William Gibson described it perfectly in The Peripheral – a kleptocracy that rides out the slow-motion end of the world to its profit while four-fifths of the globe sinks into poverty and ultimately perishes. Who has to care that there are other people when you can just facilitate their death and take their stuff?
Ben Barber was on the right track. Ultimately, though, it isn’t jihad vs McWorld: it’s the whole planet against the servile hordes of a grasping few who chant their perpetual prayer: mine.
What are we prepared to do?