An explosion leveled a good chunk of Beirut yesterday. For a country grown accustomed to its place as a regional punching bag in Levantine wars and no stranger to civil conflict itself, this should have been old hat. But this was something different. Thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate, the same substance Timothy McVeigh used to devastate the federal building in Oklahoma City, caught fire and produced an explosion of such power that its seismic impact was registered as the equivalent of a 3.3 magnitude earthquake. As of now over a hundred are confirmed dead, hundreds more are missing, thousands are wounded, and hundreds of thousands are homeless. Couple this with a polarized political system that makes Congress look like a unity government, a rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak, and an economy already in total free-fall and you've got all the ingredients necessary to spur the overthrow of the ancien regime.
It's a little early to break out the guillotines. They're still sifting through the rubble. But the past decade of Lebanese politics will be instructive in predicting what comes next. As I've said, Lebanon is no stranger to turmoil and has not been since it was granted independence by the French in 1945. In the 19th century, the colonial authorities, finding that ruling over a hostile foreign population was not particularly easy, chose to empower certain sectarian minorities to promote their interests at the expense of others, tying native fortunes to those of the colonizer and ensuring that they would maintain their rule through proxy and division.
Despite the absence of French authority, this model of politics has continued in Lebanon to the present day. Breakdown in the relations between Maronite Christians and Muslims of all stripes triggered a twenty year sectarian civil war that drew in regional and international powers and became a test-ground for the exportation of Iranian revolutionary politics. Though a tentative power-sharing accord was reached between the warring parties in 1990, domestic stability has remained precarious since then. Hezbollah, the paramilitary brainchild of the late General Soleimani and his Quds Force, managed to force an Israeli retreat from the south in 2000 and held its ground against an IDF offensive in 2006. The success of this predominantly Shiite force in resisting the hated-and-feared Zionist bogeyman increased its fortunes in Lebanese politics dramatically and so it did what any maturing and politically conscious non-state organization will do to enhance its respectability: it entered domestic politics.
This is not the whole story, of course, though Israeli apologists would certainly like to make it all about Israel. Hezbollah is something like a state-within-a-state, providing essential services to the people who dwell within its power-base, particularly in southern Lebanon. Its popularity, military strength and important political and religious connections to the Syrian Baathists (who occupied the country until a 2005 protest movement forced them out - more on that later) and Iran have enabled it to wield veto power over the formation of new governing cabinets and coerce those who oppose it. The current government, while by no means orchestrated by Hezbollah, is certainly oriented towards it. Party politics in Lebanon, funnily enough, has been split along lines of division over relations with the Syrian government. The March-8th Alliance, led by Hezbollah, supports a close relationship with the Assad regime and is comprised of a number of left-nationalist and nominally populist parties. The March-14th Alliance, on the other hand, is anti-Syrian, mostly comprised of liberal parties, and led by Saad Hariri's Future Movement. The Hairis have a colorful history (no pun intended) of shaping the politics of post-war Lebanon. The father, Rafic Hariri, was assassinated by Hezbollah in 2005, which inadvertently precipitated the Cedar Revolution, which led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country. There is a sectarian element to all this, with Saad being a Sunni and aligned with Saudi Arabia, and Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah being Shiite and aligned with Iran. A hodgepodge of other religious minorities, Druze and Christians among them, have their own political parties to represent their interests as per the peace agreement. Tellingly, most have chosen to align themselves with Hezbollah and March 8th.
The Syrian civil war, which has been raging for 9 years, has done much to unravel the Taif Agreement that ended Lebanon's own war. The Future Movement, at least in the early years of the war, was not very quiet about its support, both rhetorical and material, for the Syrian opposition. Hezbollah, after two years of mounting support, went all in and intervened in the war on the side of Assad in 2013. It did much to turn the tide and the next 7 years have been a slow reconquest of the territories that have fallen out of Assad's grip. Tensions in Syria spilled over into Lebanon, clans that supported opposing sides engaged in firefights on the streets, firebrand salafist clerics like Ahmed al-Assir led their followers into armed clashes with Hezbollah, suicide and car bombs detonated with alarming regularity from 2013 to 2015. The Islamic State surged across the Qalamoun mountains and captured the border town of Arsal in 2014. Millions of refugees have flooded into the country and now comprise approximately a quarter of its population. Gridlock between March 8th and 14th led to caretaker governments from 2013 on. All the while the culture of nepotism, patronage and sectarianism continued to corrode state capacity, the government failed to render essential services, the country's currency has dropped precipitously in value, trash has piled up on the streets. In 2017, proposed tax hikes triggered widespread protests that forced the government to backpedal. In 2019, another tax, this time on WhatsApp, exploded into a revolt against politicians in general and forced the resignation of Saad Hariri, who until then had been enjoying the fruits of being prime minister. Before that, he had been kept in limbo by the House of Saud in late 2017, forced to announce his resignation (which was swiftly reversed) from the premiership in what amounted to nothing more than a big tantrum on the part of his patrons, who naturally cannot figure out how to exercise real influence in the country (they are better at chopping up foreign journalists). Now here we are: after seven years of repeated inquiries from customs officials at the port of Beirut seeking guidance on how to safely dispose of the ammonium nitrate piled up in their storage facilities, the problem has taken care of itself quite fittingly.
So why the history lesson? To tell you that none of it really matters of course. Saudi Arabia and Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Future Movement, all the days and ides of March cannot measure up to the fact that the central Lebanese problem is stagnation and the only solution is change - whatever the cost and whatever shape such change might take. Notice how the only time the system has really been rocked has been when protest on the part of the capital-p People have broken out over some issue. The assassination of Hariri led to a revolution that ended a foreign occupation. The 2017 and 2019 street protests were ostensibly about taxes; in reality they were successive straws flattening the humps on the camel's back, and the camel is now slouching not towards Bethlehem as its Shiite retainers might wish it to but towards the abyss that its Syrian neighbors have already plunged over. This explosion was the last straw. Something has to give.
I don't think Lebanon is interested in another round of civil war. Each side, quite unlike the informational asymmetry that allows most wars to break out in the first place, has a clear idea of what to expect from the other and collective memory of the devastation wrought by the 25 years of fighting that flattened the country has proved to be a useful check when things have threatened to spiral out of control in the past. However, the situation now is so bad, the degradation of the country's politics and economics so acute, that the social sphere has no recourse but to exercise a commanding demonstration of power. It must, in essence, seize back control of the state from those who have made it a chessboard. A revolt against not any specific politics but against the political writ large is now necessary to reverse the decline. After all, the fault lies with no specific political party, really. March 8th and 14th respond to different sectors of society, but their constituents are now feeling the squeeze all the same. The spoils of a rapacious system that has raped Lebanon and removed from it its riches, stolen from its people and rendered them destitute is built into the structure of the political arrangement agreed upon by the heads of Lebanon's interest groups. It is politics that is the problem.
This line of thinking might be considered dangerous by more thoughtful observers, since a rejection of the political as such leads us down the dangerous road to apolitical technocracy, in which decision making is located in a small group of experts, and "scientific public policy" becomes the means by which social, political and economic questions are adjudicated. This is exactly the kind of state-capture by expertise that produced two decades of blundering errors and ultimately resulted in the populist explosions wracking the west. If the previous two decades have shown us anything, it's that "experts", when allowed to pursue the policies they feel best serve their countries, more often produce ruin and misery for themselves and others than anything else. How, then, to reconcile the necessity of the political with a mass-movement committed to anti-politics?
Something curious is happening in other countries bordering the Mediterranean sea whose political economies are facing equally dire circumstances. A new party family, dubbed techno-populist by observers, is emerging in those nations of southern Europe which continue to face stagnating economic conditions, high unemployment, painful austerity, and where debt service as a proportion of GDP continues to rise dramatically. These debtor nations, having failed to recover from the systemic crisis of the Eurozone triggered by the Great Recession, have watched as what had once been solid party systems crumble under the strains of the slow-moving crisis. In some countries, the result has been a turn towards left-populism. In others, right-wing populism. But in some states, particularly Italy, something new has been born. The people have taken their anti-system and anti-establishment sentiments and channeled them into the creation of new, explicitly non-ideological parties that nevertheless retain the discourse of populism.
This is curious, because populism, despite its occasional designation as a "thin ideology", is associated not merely with mass movements but with ideological mass politics. Indeed, someone who considers the history of populist movements, particularly the agrarian radicals of the 1890s, might be inclined to interpret their later embrace of targeted interest group tactics and incorporation into the federal bureaucracy as the resignation of politics in the face of the unconquerable logic of the administrative state. If you can't beat them, join them. But the collision between ideological mass movements and what has been dubbed by some as the "technostructure" need not, as a rule, result in the dissipation of mass politics into the machinery of the state. Indeed, the new challenge for populists seems not to be the question of how to win power (the people seem quite satisfied to elevate them there) but how to master the problem of hostile administration after their ascent.
One solution seems to be to abandon ideology without abandoning mass politics. In essence, we are separating politics from ideology. On the face of it, this is absurd. What is politics without ideology? Simple. It's mass anti-politics. To prevent co-optation, the movement must, after it wins power, continue to govern as if it is not in power. Given a minute's consideration, this appears to be a feature and not a bug. The entire point of an anti-system, anti-establishment movement is to destroy the system and the establishment it supports. In order to prevent capture by the system, it must level everything even after it wins power, including itself. Short of civil war, the only way for anti-politics to defeat politics is to wash it all away from the inside. To halt the game, you must flip the board.
This is why "post-ideological" parties like Italy's Five Star Movement are so puzzling to observers. Its schizophrenic governing style and continued hostile rhetoric against the "system" appear to be undercutting its ability to deliver on its promises. But this was its promise. It demanded an end to elite-driven politics, it promised the introduction of technology as a direct mediator between the people and its representatives, its plebiscitarian character and fondness for referendums, its mishmash of positions taken from both left and right, its focus on "apolitical" problems as represented by the five stars - water, development, transportation, environment and digital access - are all indicative of its desire to transcend polarization and politics. It does not refer to itself as a political party. It's a broad-based cross-party post-ideological anti-political movement and its inability to govern is of no moment. They are there, first and foremost, to destroy.
One must admit a certain amount of flexibility in our use of terminology here. This is not merely a semantic issue. Five Star is certainly non-ideological and hostile to politics as such, even as it has embraced the power of the masses and has committed itself to direct democracy. The party is certainly riven with dispute and its ability to adequately destroy the liberal institutions that seek to undermine it has been hampered by political expediencies and conflict with other parties and supranational entities. The vestiges of political DNA remain within it, that is the danger of such a movement. When the conditions are right, the only power on Earth that can defeat it is itself. By attaching itself to Italy's Democratic Party in a new coalition, it has surrendered ever more of itself to a political configuration that separates it from the masses, hence its dramatic drop in the polls. Its "government of change" with Lega Nord ended not because it was unworkable, but because Lega's leading personality is an egotist. They entered government with the right impulses.
What does this mean for Lebanon? For a mass anti-politics to succeed, they must replicate the successes of past protest by adopting the Five Star model as a guide. In 2005, the People secured the withdrawal of the Syrian army. In 2017, they forced the state to roll back its taxation scheme. In 2019, they forced the resignation of Saad Hariri as prime minister. Now, in the wake of Beirut's disaster, they have an opportunity to put an end to the whole thing. The history, the politics, none of it is relevant any longer. All that matters is the all-consuming tide of rage that can sweep away Lebanon's decrepit institutions. Everything must go. The system must be demolished, smashed, obliterated, incinerated, annihilated, inundated by the ravenous desire for change-at-all-costs.
Will they? Won't they? Anger is simmering in the streets as we speak. There will surely be a reckoning. But what form it takes is up to them. Surely the Lebanese will decide to replicate their previous experiences in mass protest. Past experience tells us that the state, brittle and enervated as it is, will capitulate fairly quickly to demands. The question is whether the demands will be specific, substantive and politically motivated, or broad, non-ideological, and anti-political. An inability to pinpoint specific actions it can stake to quell discontent may lead the state to violent action in order to defend itself. But the army is widely praised as an apolitical institution and with the salary of the individual soldier in steep decline it seems unlikely that they will come to its defense.
Say the protests adapt the Five Star model as a principle of organization. Let's say it even succeeds. The inevitable question among horrified commentators and observers will be: What comes next? To that I have to say: Who cares?
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