“If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.
Zineb, I also agree with you Rubio, and Rogers that Third-Worldism is a major challenge to the US and the world precisely because it so insidious and so seductive to cultural elites and policymakers in the West. Your short essay is really effective at both situating the movement in the intellectual history and identifying the ideology’s pathologies. I’ll be sharing and discussing it with likeminded friends in the coming days.
The strongest part of this piece is the Furet insight, and it deserves to be pushed further: a mentalité survives falsification because it was never a set of propositions. What it actually is, I would argue, is a substitution machine.It replaces the ground of politics (the real functioning of real societies) with a fixed moral hierarchy that can be applied anywhere, indefinitely: victimhood confers legitimacy, power confers guilt. That is why categories rotate (class, race, colonizer) while the mechanism persists: the content was always dispensable; the substitution was the point. And the empirical test is brutal: the ideology's own ground has abandoned it. Cubans flee Cuba; Iranians risk death protesting. Third-Worldism now lives almost entirely in advocates detached from the world it claims to speak for.
But here is a friendly objection. "Naming the threat" is a Schmittian gesture: it constitutes the political through the friend-enemy distinction. The essay criticizes Third-Worldism for dissolving every conflict into a single story, and then gathers universities, newsrooms, foundations, and movements into a single story of its own. A frame built against a totalizing frame inherits its structure. Your own epigraph warns of this: Aron asks us to doubt all the models, including the counter-model.
The way out, I think, is not a better name for the enemy but a different measure of legitimacy. Victimhood does not confer legitimacy; neither does power; neither does having the right enemy. Legitimacy has only one source: whether an order serves the survival and flourishing of humanity, the ground beneath it. That test condemns Havana and Tehran without invoking ideology at all. It also disciplines the counter-frame, because it must be applied at home too. An anti-imperial war can be legitimate self-defense (Turkey's War of Independence was exactly that: it ended where survival was secured, and made peace with its enemies); a "resistance" that feeds on permanent grievance is not. The distinction Third-Worldism erases, and that naming an enemy cannot restore, is the distinction between defending a ground and consuming one.
We must make anti-Americanism and the overt hateful bigotry that comes with it TABOO again. This hate and all who espouse and sanitize it must be ostracized out of polite society and our mainstream politics, as we did to marginalize and defeat the KKK, or it will normalize and destroy the West.
Marco Rubio is a hollow political performer — a man who talks big but thinks small. I see him as a slogan machine with no depth, no historical grasp, and no real spine. His ideology feels flimsy, his judgment shaky, and his relevance shrinking every year. Rubio represents the kind of empty politics that drags America into confusion rather than clarity.
Despite some lip service to that and reliance for support in UN GA, China is increasingly a developed country with surpluses of goods and capital, perhaps even the largest in the world.
“…A movement organized around grievance rather than program can migrate from climate to Gaza to Cuba without contradiction, because the object of protest is interchangeable so long as the accused remains the same…”
Unfortunately “grievance”, and its emotional handmaiden. ‘victimhood’, have become the near endemic lodestones of all shades of political movement across the developed world, mainly because they are such easy accusations to make (like “Racist”) and so easy to make appear as self-evident.
Absurdly, this instinct has become so entrenched that it can switch not only from Cuba to Gaza as you suggest, but as easily to national Reparations claims, Trans activism, BLM, ICE, and I would argue, as the driver for mass cross border migration from the Global South to the North.
Same pain, same easy reflexive response. You owe me: I want: I take.
Some of these claims are obviously valid and should be addressed by the Global North, but sadly the fog of near universal pathological self regard and self promotion of ‘rights’ obscures and devalues any legitimacy in those claims.
All we can hope that with the inevitable pushback balance is restored so those legitimate claims can be addressed and Social Justice vindicated so wounds can heal.
What third world “claims are obviously valid” ? There are no obviously valid claims , only poorly conceived fakes fabrications and frauds . Reject the invalid logic of decline - restore strength and prosperity for the first world .
This does not imply some moral imperative for Reparations, but it does suggest a practical obligation to share the accrued benefits by encouraging self-help through reciprocity.
For all its ills 19th century British colonialism left social structures such as education and civic administration, and physical infrastructure such as roads and railways, which still benefit parts of Africa to this day.
Perhaps the next step is to materially assist the Continent, not through condescending ‘Aid’ which largely fuels corruption while making donor countries feel better about themselves, but through direct economic investment building car factories, with the educational and economic benefits that would bring to the populace.
They need to adopt private property, meritocracy over tribalism, rule of law and until they do they will be taken advantage of by their own. The North has taken advantage but it was always a local selling their own out. Even with the aid. The above is the magic, not the dirt here. That they will most likely never adopt the above is the tragic.
The legitimacy of the US is preserved as a doctrine that must never be questioned. Western hegemony is defined through the "Other." In fact, the "Other" is defined as a threat. But when it comes to other countries in other continents, the same people say "nation-states are bad, feudalism was better". Pure orientalism!
I like your articulation of this rhetoric. What theoretical framings of this discourse are you pulling on or can you reference? Ian Buruna wrote a book many years ago - Occidentalism - that tracks. Anyone else mapping this ideological terrain you find helpful?
Glad you’re back!
Brilliantly put, as always
Magistral!
Zineb, I also agree with you Rubio, and Rogers that Third-Worldism is a major challenge to the US and the world precisely because it so insidious and so seductive to cultural elites and policymakers in the West. Your short essay is really effective at both situating the movement in the intellectual history and identifying the ideology’s pathologies. I’ll be sharing and discussing it with likeminded friends in the coming days.
Excellent!
The strongest part of this piece is the Furet insight, and it deserves to be pushed further: a mentalité survives falsification because it was never a set of propositions. What it actually is, I would argue, is a substitution machine.It replaces the ground of politics (the real functioning of real societies) with a fixed moral hierarchy that can be applied anywhere, indefinitely: victimhood confers legitimacy, power confers guilt. That is why categories rotate (class, race, colonizer) while the mechanism persists: the content was always dispensable; the substitution was the point. And the empirical test is brutal: the ideology's own ground has abandoned it. Cubans flee Cuba; Iranians risk death protesting. Third-Worldism now lives almost entirely in advocates detached from the world it claims to speak for.
But here is a friendly objection. "Naming the threat" is a Schmittian gesture: it constitutes the political through the friend-enemy distinction. The essay criticizes Third-Worldism for dissolving every conflict into a single story, and then gathers universities, newsrooms, foundations, and movements into a single story of its own. A frame built against a totalizing frame inherits its structure. Your own epigraph warns of this: Aron asks us to doubt all the models, including the counter-model.
The way out, I think, is not a better name for the enemy but a different measure of legitimacy. Victimhood does not confer legitimacy; neither does power; neither does having the right enemy. Legitimacy has only one source: whether an order serves the survival and flourishing of humanity, the ground beneath it. That test condemns Havana and Tehran without invoking ideology at all. It also disciplines the counter-frame, because it must be applied at home too. An anti-imperial war can be legitimate self-defense (Turkey's War of Independence was exactly that: it ended where survival was secured, and made peace with its enemies); a "resistance" that feeds on permanent grievance is not. The distinction Third-Worldism erases, and that naming an enemy cannot restore, is the distinction between defending a ground and consuming one.
We must make anti-Americanism and the overt hateful bigotry that comes with it TABOO again. This hate and all who espouse and sanitize it must be ostracized out of polite society and our mainstream politics, as we did to marginalize and defeat the KKK, or it will normalize and destroy the West.
The Russian and Persian Empires are currently expanding their colonial empires. Hidden in plain sight.
Marco Rubio is a hollow political performer — a man who talks big but thinks small. I see him as a slogan machine with no depth, no historical grasp, and no real spine. His ideology feels flimsy, his judgment shaky, and his relevance shrinking every year. Rubio represents the kind of empty politics that drags America into confusion rather than clarity.
Your view is idiotic and says far more about you than him.
"Third, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism constitute one commitment expressed at two levels of a single hierarchy"....well put!
does this explain any conspiracy theory or dream-the 'deep state',the confederacy,maga,etc.,where facts are irrelevant vis-a-vis 'alternate truths'?
No mention of the Chinese version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Worlds_Theory
Despite some lip service to that and reliance for support in UN GA, China is increasingly a developed country with surpluses of goods and capital, perhaps even the largest in the world.
There is a very interesting discussion on the phenomenon of “Third-Worldism.” It’s on YouTube: 133: Mamdani and America’s new left, with Reihan Salam
“…A movement organized around grievance rather than program can migrate from climate to Gaza to Cuba without contradiction, because the object of protest is interchangeable so long as the accused remains the same…”
Unfortunately “grievance”, and its emotional handmaiden. ‘victimhood’, have become the near endemic lodestones of all shades of political movement across the developed world, mainly because they are such easy accusations to make (like “Racist”) and so easy to make appear as self-evident.
Absurdly, this instinct has become so entrenched that it can switch not only from Cuba to Gaza as you suggest, but as easily to national Reparations claims, Trans activism, BLM, ICE, and I would argue, as the driver for mass cross border migration from the Global South to the North.
Same pain, same easy reflexive response. You owe me: I want: I take.
Some of these claims are obviously valid and should be addressed by the Global North, but sadly the fog of near universal pathological self regard and self promotion of ‘rights’ obscures and devalues any legitimacy in those claims.
All we can hope that with the inevitable pushback balance is restored so those legitimate claims can be addressed and Social Justice vindicated so wounds can heal.
What third world “claims are obviously valid” ? There are no obviously valid claims , only poorly conceived fakes fabrications and frauds . Reject the invalid logic of decline - restore strength and prosperity for the first world .
Historically, Empires looted for their own gain.
This does not imply some moral imperative for Reparations, but it does suggest a practical obligation to share the accrued benefits by encouraging self-help through reciprocity.
For all its ills 19th century British colonialism left social structures such as education and civic administration, and physical infrastructure such as roads and railways, which still benefit parts of Africa to this day.
Perhaps the next step is to materially assist the Continent, not through condescending ‘Aid’ which largely fuels corruption while making donor countries feel better about themselves, but through direct economic investment building car factories, with the educational and economic benefits that would bring to the populace.
They need to adopt private property, meritocracy over tribalism, rule of law and until they do they will be taken advantage of by their own. The North has taken advantage but it was always a local selling their own out. Even with the aid. The above is the magic, not the dirt here. That they will most likely never adopt the above is the tragic.
The legitimacy of the US is preserved as a doctrine that must never be questioned. Western hegemony is defined through the "Other." In fact, the "Other" is defined as a threat. But when it comes to other countries in other continents, the same people say "nation-states are bad, feudalism was better". Pure orientalism!
I like your articulation of this rhetoric. What theoretical framings of this discourse are you pulling on or can you reference? Ian Buruna wrote a book many years ago - Occidentalism - that tracks. Anyone else mapping this ideological terrain you find helpful?