The End of the Belle Époque
Sid Shniad
—Mohsin Hamid,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
So speaks Changez, the Princeton-educated reluctant fundamentalist of Hamid’s 2007 novel. An international bestseller later turned into a film by Mira Nair, the book owed its success, in part, to its blunt articulation of the fear and loathing provoked by the American Empire even among many of its eager janissaries. Changez, like many real-life middle-class Muslims in Asia and Africa, had scrambled to join the transnational elite created by U.S.-led global capitalism. Yet they couldn’t escape the racist degradations institutionalized in American life by the war on terror—the kind that now rain down on Zohran Mamdani (Nair’s son and the Democratic nominee for New York mayor in next month’s election) from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Fox News.
I remember that my own response to the eruption of schadenfreude in The Reluctant Fundamentalist was that a Pakistani Muslim might feel this way, but no Indian green-card holder would. A global culture of anti-Americanism had long been nourished by the foreign policy of the United States, its socioeconomic manipulation of other countries through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and its overall supervision of a global economy that produced far more losers than winners. And Pakistan, a nation whose politics and culture were ravaged by the actions of CIA-sponsored Islamists and military dictators, had arguably suffered more as a stalwart client state than the countries invaded and bombed by the United States had.
However, in India and its diaspora, supposedly rising after centuries of torpor, we were almost entirely immune to Changez’s gratification at American suffering. Barely a year after the publication of Hamid’s novel, India’s then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, told a startled George W. Bush that the “people of India deeply love you.” He was being more sincere, and represented a broader public consensus, than the secretary-general of NATO was when he recently anointed Donald Trump as Europe’s “daddy.”
India’s romance with the land of the free was very belated, coming decades after 1945, when Europeans became, following their destructive civil wars, the first large population to apprentice itself, culturally as well as politically, to the United States. Moreover, our Americanophilia flourished, it is now clear, at the wrong time. By the mid-Aughts, the deindustrializing superpower, committed to forever wars abroad and extreme inequality at home, was ripe for Trumpism. The long infatuation with America among China’s aspiring classes had already begun to sour, partly owing to the U.S. bombing in 1999 of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Nevertheless, more and more educated Indians felt a deep faith in an eternal Pax Americana and the belief that, as Thomas Friedman put it in a 1999 New York Times “manifesto,” “Globalization-is-U.S.” and “Americans are the apostles of the Fast World, the prophets of the free market and the high priests of high tech.”
The election of Barack Obama suggested to many Indians that America was moving toward a more perfect union and an amicable postracial age. As he embraced Singh’s successor, Narendra Modi, turning the Hindu nationalist once barred from entering the United States into a close ally, many “twice-born” Indians were also enthused by the prospect that the pitiably poor and lost country they had been forced to leave could now become a partner to their chosen homeland. The preponderance today in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street of Anglophone Brahmins interfacing between the ruling classes of India and the United States, from Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to Balaji Srinivasan, is no coincidence. Nor is the consistently favorable view of the United States among Indians, as noted by opinion polls, even after the country’s global standing began to plummet during Biden’s and Trump’s annihilation of the “rules-based international order.”
The cruelty, recklessness, and ineptitude of America’s unabashedly white-supremacist ruling class during Trump’s second stint, however, has shocked and horrified even the country’s most loyal allies and epigones worldwide. “In Delhi’s book-lined studies and the glass-walled corporate towers of Mumbai, grandees are suffering from vertigo,” The Economist reported in July—even before Trump described India’s economy as “dead” and punished it with 50 percent tariffs. Trump’s assault on Iran, encouragement to Israel’s ethnic cleansers, and mixed signals to Vladimir Putin might have left the world’s self-Americanizing go-getters confused or ambivalent, but not his trade wars, virulent denunciations of immigration, restrictions on H-1B visas, crackdowns on foreign university students, televised humiliations of world leaders, and deportations of dark-skinned non-Americans in shackles. Upwardly mobile Asians and Africans glamoured by Silicon Valley tech bros can afford to be indifferent to the hosannas to Hitler from Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, but they manifestly find it harder to swallow the outbursts of Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital.
It seems clear that the forces of ideological racism, latent for decades, have reemerged in the United States to accomplish their original function of manufacturing higher status for struggling whites. The twin bases of the American experiment in political pluralism—the fable about the United States as a land of immigrants and the reality of unchallenged global primacy—are simultaneously crumbling. The Belle Époque of U.S.-led global capitalism, which seduced the losers of history with its promise of serene social mobility and harmonious multiculturalism, has ended, plunging the Americanizing classes of the world into a crisis that for them is as much spiritual and existential as it is geopolitical and economic.
The crisis is especially desolating for those who had discarded strong traditions of national autonomy and self-respect in order to accept American tutelage. At midcentury, two fratricidal wars had destroyed Europe’s self-confidence as well as its economic power; they exposed a helpless continent to prolonged cultural Americanization and a military and economic parasitism that has made many European leaders today so miserably slavish before Trump. But the anticolonial movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America always sought moral, intellectual, and political freedom from the white masters of the universe; for decades, they tried to formulate their own visions of the good life and the just society.
Thus, generations of postcolonial Asians and Africans grew up with the assumption, buttressed by school textbooks, print culture, and mass media, that they were masters of their own destiny. In India, for instance, much patriotic pride was drawn from the fact that the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, stood up to American Cold Warriors (he was fond of calling John Foster Dulles, the most fervent of them, “Dull, Duller, Dulles”), or that Indira Gandhi, another long-serving prime minister, seemed to actively court Richard Nixon’s hatred during India’s war with U.S.-supported Pakistan in 1971.
It wasn’t just the Nehru-Gandhi aristocracy and its intellectual courtiers who saw American politicians and journalists as conceited and ignorant upstarts. The writings of R. K. Narayan, a pioneering Indian novelist who wrote in English, radiate spiritual snobbery, which was also commonplace among many European intellectuals: a resentment, shared by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Albert Camus, of America as a “superficial monster” that, as E. M. Cioran put it, “stands before the world as an impetuous void.”
Popular opinion was also shaped by an overwhelmingly left-leaning intelligentsia created and shaped by the long national struggle against European imperialism. Writers, journalists, artists, and filmmakers were prone to respond to America’s expanded role in the world—from the nuclear incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister in 1953, the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, the arming of a genocidal regime in Pakistan in 1971, and the CIA-engineered coup in Chile in 1973—with reinvigorated critiques of racism and neoimperialism.
The freshly and often insufficiently imagined communities of Asia and Africa struggled before the challenges of state building and sustaining economic growth. In the same era of fitful decolonization that began in the late Forties, the power of the old masters of the universe grew at a historically unprecedented rate. Capitalism recovered from its nadir in the Thirties and found a center in a United States that was unscathed, and actually empowered, by war; it then unfolded globally through intricate circuits of production and circulation, with the help of the modernization of transportation and communication, as well as the expansion of the military-industrial complex.
To Indians in the early Nineties lurching out of a conflict-ridden era and a stagnant economy, the United States represented an irresistible aesthetic and moral style, especially on the new Murdoch-owned television channels that showcased the silicone of Pamela Anderson and the testosterone of actors like Sylvester Stallone. American icons and products—Rambo in Afghanistan, the Statue of Liberty–esque Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square, McDonald’s and CNN everywhere—seemed seductively omnipresent. Europe, with its rich past, had fascinated many of its colonial subjects. The United States, however, presumably founded in order to rid citizens of the weight of history and tradition and to orient them toward a continuously improving future, offered more, and alluringly different, temptations.
Few non-American populations upheld more jauntily than Indians what Don DeLillo, trying to explain the 9/11 attacks in these pages, thought the jihadis despised: “the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind.” Speaking at an event hosted by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank, in 1990, V. S. Naipaul announced the end of racism and hailed the American notion of happiness as “an immense human idea” that would blow away all ideological fanaticisms. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, Bal Thackeray, cartoonist and founder of the Shiv Sena, the Hindu militant organization in Mumbai, received Michael Jackson at his home in 1996 and boasted afterward that the pop star had used and then autographed his lavatory.
I remember how, in the Nineties in India, after socialist regimes imploded across Europe, politicians, businessmen, and opinion makers suddenly began to present apprenticeship to America as the quickest route to the “tryst with destiny” once promised by Nehru—a tryst postponed for decades, in many resentful Indians’ eyes, by feckless ventures in geopolitical nonalignment, affirmative action for low-caste Hindus, and a socialistic economy. And there were many others in the floundering nation-states of Asia and Africa who succumbed to the American ideology of individual aggrandizement and self-cherishing. Indar, an East African of Indian ancestry in Naipaul’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River, sums up the hyperindividualistic ethic that was replacing a weakened postcolonial ethos of collective welfare even before the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions got under way. “The world is a rich place,” he says. “It all depends on what you choose in it. You can be sentimental and embrace the idea of your own defeat. . . . But now I want to win and win and win.”
Winning was easier for those who spoke English relatively well: Anglophone Asians and Africans turned out to be much better placed than members of the large Chinese diaspora to benefit from neoliberal globalization under American auspices. As it happened, the political and socioeconomic interests of the English-speaking transnational class in India and the elite in the United States interlocked as smoothly as those underpinning the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States. By the mid-Aughts, many members of the diasporic Indian intelligentsia served as proxies for the American Establishment, emphasizing the virtues of U.S.-style capitalism to eager audiences in Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, as well as in the pages of major American newspapers.
Such a sharp ideological rupture with the past was evident in the acrimonious debate between two prominent Western economists of Indian origin: Amartya Sen, who had been traumatized by the British-induced Bengal famine of 1943 into a lifelong dedication to social democracy, and Jagdish Bhagwati, the self-proclaimed “world’s foremost free trader.” Sen backed the indispensable role of the state in creating a healthy and well-educated populace; Bhagwati, from his perch at Columbia University and the Council on Foreign Relations, hailed deregulated markets as a model for humanity.
As late as 2008, with the Great Recession looming and militarism and xenophobia entrenched in American life, Fareed Zakaria, the son of an eminent Indian freedom fighter and scholar of Islam, insisted that “the world is going America’s way,” with countries “becoming more open, market friendly, and democratic.” However false, such assertions have utility today insofar as they make clear that many ambitious immigrants have come to thrive on the correct performance of the mores and attitudes of the American ruling class. The way Zohran Mamdani—the son of an Indian-Ugandan Muslim scholar of Africa—has repudiated these values, along with his adherence to a cosmopolitan vision of peace and justice, guarantees extreme hostility to him among the Establishment. Equally unsurprisingly, Zakaria, who at Yale in 1985, during the Reagan ascendancy, publicly scorned idealism and argued against the university divesting from apartheid South Africa, claimed in 2017 that Trump had become “presidential” by bombing Syria, and was heard at the Aspen Ideas Festival this past summer claiming that, aside from “the Gaza issue,” Benjamin Netanyahu was doing “extraordinarily well.”
But careful mimicry of the current American elite is unlikely to yield the same high returns it once did. An extermination of the brutes in the Middle East, presided over by Obama’s successors, has been followed by a swift cancellation by Trumpian decree of the postracial age. America seems unlikely to be made great again by the demagogues of white nationalism, who cannot help but channel fury over irreversible decline at those who have been working hard, through either literal or spiritual immigration, to become American. Yet again such Americanized or Americanizing individuals are accused of globalizing the intifada, if not jihad. Confronted with the arduous task of finding a new identity and replacing their defunct belief system, many of them may, like Changez, drift into a reluctant fundamentalism of their own.