CP (#16) / A Great Dis-Ordering: War in the Middle East and the American Presidential Election (and Many Other Things)
“Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”
I wrote this essay—which is long (about 2,200 words)—four days after war broke out between Hamas and Israel on October 7, 2023. Please bear with me as you read. There’s a lot of cool stuff in here. Much of it speculative, but all of it worth pondering, I think. And it predicts a lot that has actually happened.
I’d like to explore the implications of a violent, percussive war in the Middle East for domestic American politics. The impacts specifically matter because we’re entering a political season that had already promised — even without war in Ukraine and now in the so-called Holy Land — to be an unholy shit show.
As I wrote the other day, the outbreak of violent struggle in Israel and the occupied territories will likely favor Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the authoritarian Christian nationalism we’ve already seen the United States bend toward. To illustrate, I’ll use metaphors of quantum entanglement, fibrillation, contagion, and recursion — all drawn from complexity science — to explain.
To be clear, what follows is radical speculation. But the 2024 elections could prove to be an interesting test of an interesting hypothesis.
Local Politics
Consider this fact. Nearly 10 percent of the world’s Jewish population lives in New York City. Last weekend, a pro-Palestinian Democratic Socialists of America rally in New York—which progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delayed in condemning—disclosed political fault lines within the Democratic Party that could help to shift advantage to Republicans next November.
According to the New York Times, fallout from this rally “underscored how deeply the seemingly faraway conflict in Israel resonates in even the most local of political battles, in a city home to more Jews than any other in the world.”
The Times piece makes the point for me. No religious war is local. All religious wars are local. The underlying religious dynamics of the Hamas attack on Israel are instantly reverberating in the United States.
What I’ll say up front is that the moral lens to which politicians and pundits alike have instantly retreated—as if to a bunker—is less than worthless. To reduce commentary and analysis to the “self-evident” notion that the Hamas attack is all about “evil” (by definition) attacking “good” (because what else does “evil” do) tells us nothing while concealing everything. Let’s use the notion of quantum entanglement to unentangle ourselves.
Quantum Entanglement
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics where the properties of two or more particles link or correlate even when separated by large distances. Measurements performed on one particle instantaneously influence the state of the other entangled particles. Einstein famously described quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance.”
Quantum entanglement evades standard cause-effect models associated with classical physics. It is about correlation. The phrase correlation is not causation generally refers to the problem of overdetermination. Correlation implies many causes for a single outcome, which makes it difficult to establish clear causal lines. Quantum entanglement is different—it implies no causes for the parallel behavior of particles across spacetime. Which is what makes it “spooky.”
Within complex cultures and societies, strict causation models tend to break down or prove unreliable. Far more often than we would like to believe, correlation is actually our only basis for framing and understanding human behavior. Which poses a problem for classical explanatory models of politics. But creates an opportunity for quantum explanatory models, if perhaps only metaphorically.
In this context, the concept of quantum entanglement can help us to imagine the significance of parallel, correlated social phenomena occurring at a distance, but nearly in real time, within hyperlocal settings. We’ll get to the hyperlocal portion of this argument at the end of this essay.
Fibrillation and Contagion
I’m not exactly arguing that quantum entanglement explains a relationship between the murderous zeal with which the IDF and Hamas are now seeking to exterminate each other and presidential election politics in the United States. However, I’m also not prepared to argue that it does not.
This connection between two distant events seems poised somewhere between correlation and causation, between quantum entanglement and classical mechanics. Two additional ideas—fibrillation and contagion—also can help to explain.
The analogy between atrial fibrillation and quantum entanglement is loose, not scientific, evoking nonetheless a metaphorical sense of "spooky action at a distance." In fibrillation, rapid chaotic excitation spreads unpredictably across heart tissue, like instant coordination between distant regions. Similarly, with entanglement, measuring one particle mysteriously affects its partner instantaneously, even light years away. Mechanisms behind fibrillation and entanglement differ fundamentally. Most physicists agree entanglement cannot enable direct signaling, communication, or coordination. Nonetheless, the resemblances tantalize.
We can extend this metaphor further, by introducing the notion of contagion at the population level, a reimagination of epidemic spread as a form of "social fibrillation,” characterized by erratic, hard-to-predict waves of disease transmission from person to person. In chaotic disease propagation models, rapid jumps of infection between populations have been described as "fibrillatory bursts", loosely comparing it to the electrical bursts during heart fibrillation.
While the mechanisms behind them are entirely different, high-level similarities exist between the probabilistic, stochastic nature of both quantum entanglement and disease contagion. Entanglement generates correlated random outcomes between quantum particles when measured. In the same manner, contagion spreads in a stochastic manner between hosts and populations. Just as religious conflict can flame in one location as if ignited from a spark on the other side of the globe.
The Messy Politics of Fractal Recursion
But let’s return specifically to the relationship between Israel’s war with Hamas and presidential politics in the United States. I’d like to propose a template for the model that can explain how the eruption of war in the Middle East might predict, more than a year ahead of the November 2024 election—and by virtue of correlation, not causation—that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans will sweep to victory.
A causation model alone might predict effects from Middle Eastern war that would elect Trump. I am not proposing such a model. What I’m suggesting instead is that correlations exist between the political and religious situation in the Unholy Land and the political and religious situation in the Disunited States of America.
Other correlations of this sort exist, as well, throughout the world. They are a product of the Great Dis-Ordering of global relationships since the end of the Cold War, which have reproduced and spread, recursively, to each fragment of the disaggregating politics of the planet. What the New York Times and political scientists more soothingly refer to as the transition from stable world order governed largely by the United States to a multi-polar world governed by … no one.
It’s become a reflex from people on the political right and left to disparage cosmopolitan elites and global integration. This is a classic anti-modernist, anti-intellectual, anti-rational, counter-Reformation, counter-Enlightenment, posture that we typically associate with cycles of cultural and religious reaction. These cycles also correlate (that world again) with autocracy, violent repression, and savage regional (and sometimes global) wars.
Recursion is a concept associated with complexity science that often appears in conversations about self-similarity in fractal mappings of the world. The pioneer of such mappings—known as Mandelbrot Sets—is the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Consider a mapping of a coastline. At each scale of the map—from 100 miles per square inch to 100 feet per square inch—one will find a statistically random, yet constrained topography that looks similar. Trees can possess similar recursive properties.
The world in which now live offers a map of the world that you get without hegemonic ideas, elites, and interests that can form the basis for global partnerships and integration. It’s not a pretty map of the world. It’s a rough, chaotic fractal map! But it’s also been more the norm historically than the relative period of peace and prosperity in the decades since the end of World War II.
As Chinese political scientist and regime adviser Zheng Yongnian has written, “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”
A Profound Irony
Let’s consider a profound irony. A spate of publications have recently observed a global decline of religiosity. This a fascinating development, for sure. In the past 10 or 15 years, rates of unbelievers or nonbelievers in any organized religion or any superimposing deity have more than doubled. If unbelief was a faith — which, despite procrustean efforts to claim it is, clearly is not — it would be the most widespread and prevalent religion in the world.
But this is not yet the irony. The irony—which also seems to eluding most pundits—is that despite the historically low percentage of people with religious conviction, the influence of religious conservatives may well be at an all-time high. We see this in Israel and in the United States. In my lists of saved news stories, for instance, articles about the decline of religiosity exist side by side with articles about how a reactionary Supreme Court has elevated “religious freedom” above all other freedoms and rights, about how the right wing is turning religion into identity.
This paradox exists around the world, representing a turning-inward—rather than a turning-toward—a fractal roughening of the landscape of politics, which has become more local, more contested, more fraught, more violent, more paranoid, and more primitive as global institutions have broken down. We can see this fracturing today in the Republican Party of the United States, as its most extreme members dig in and chip away at coalitions and partnerships the provided a foundation for governing. No such foundation remains.
Hyperlocal Entanglements
Fractal self-similarity is equivalent in social terms to fractal self-separation. Over half of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population in Israel live in only four cities: Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Ashdod and Elad. We’re well aware of the self-sorting that has occurred in the United States in recent decades, a phenomenon that has itself sharpened identities (and identity politics) and curved geographies in on themselves. Let’s call this turning-inward a version of hyperlocalism, the politics of which produce and reinforce affinities—not with contiguous neighborhoods and settlements and regions, but with other hyperlocal geographies around the world.
The tendency of hyperlocal geographies is to dis-integrate socially; to devolve emotionally and psychologically; to regress into fear-based and resentment-based identities; to retreat into tradition; to dismiss the value and promise of education, learning, novelty, and adventure; to bunker down; to lash out; to resolve identity into territory; to transform difference into enmity.
Support for Israel—and for the ultra-Orthodox and religious nationalist factions that govern the nation—have plausibly activated and excited mirror neurons among religious conservatives in the United States, particularly among Protestant evangelicals—many of whom anticipate that conflict in Holy Land presages the end times and the return of Jesus—but also among conservative and traditionalist Catholics who stand upon the ramparts of natural law morality.
But this type of neuronal excitation extends well beyond religious conservatives. We see it in liberal Jews and liberal Democrats and even in liberal Biden (who has famously stated in the past that had he been born Jewish, he would be Zionist). After all, who can resist a bracing battle between good and evil. Everyone needs a good life-and-death struggle now and then. You can’t know you’re alive unless lots of other people are dead! It’s as if we’re all at the tailgate party before the big game. Roll Tide! But this type of mirroring is not what I am talking about.
A Fully Fractal World
Of course, we expect Christian nationalists and evangelicals in the United States generally to rally around the cause of Israeli religious nationalists, and to sharpen their anti-modernist critique of secular, cosmopolitan elites. If the religious war in Israel and the Palestinian territories tips the balance in favor of Trump and the Republicans, it will result from this nearly cellular identification of religious conservatives in key battleground states with their counterparts in Israel.
But the connections will be based on correlation, not causation; on stochastics and randomness; not linear dynamics. They will be entangled hyperlocally. The texture of politics has changed in our lifetimes. We do not much perceive or take note of this texture in our daily existences. But it shapes our reality and spreads well beyond the local boundaries and signposts of our lives.
What human societies have witnessed since the end of the Cold War has been a gradual dis-integration that concentrates energy and emotion within regressively more provincial and primitive—but correspondingly more intense and rooted local identities. As I’ve mentioned, this type of hyperlocalism has been the norm historically and for most people.
The dis-integration of the connective tissues of the global regime held up by the United States and by multilateral, multinational political and economic institutions since the end of World War II—and particularly since the end of the Cold War and the advent of neoliberalism—have corresponded to an exponential proliferation globally of hyperlocal geographies.
We need not presume some active communication or connection between these hyperlocal geographies to conceptualize a contagion of reaction. But the probabilities do change. We now live in a fully fractal world, in which the availability of sharp-edged nodes of resistance and reaction at local and regional levels have tilted the world dramatically toward a cycle of decline.
None of this guarantees Trump and Republicans will reclaim power in 2024. But the map of hyperlocalism is blinking red around the world. To the extent events—such as this new war in the Middle East—inflame the texture of these relationships and multiply and intensify their presence, the probabilities will inexorably shift from maybe to likely.