The Decade of Chicken Guts

Lenin once said there are decades when nothing happens, and days when decades happen. The one that’s about to stumble to its end in a few days fell somewhere in between. A decade full of fateful turning points that—perhaps precisely because of that—dragged on like a string of chicken guts. And in most ways, things got worse.

Part of this period, I was professionally responsible for analyzing geopolitical changes in the international environment. The job wasn’t too demanding; in most cases, it was enough to predict the worst-case scenario. I’m exaggerating a bit—but not enough to feel any relief.

If I had to choose one feature that most characterizes the changes of recent years, it would be the loss of a sense of security. People are no longer optimistic. The excitement and belief in a better future, so characteristic of the late 1990s and early 2000s, has been replaced by fear.

In the situation we’ve found ourselves in, there are plenty of wrong responses. For example, we can pretend everything is fine. We ignore the obvious signs that things are heading in the wrong direction—because it’s easier, because it scares us less, or because it lets us continue acting selfishly while fooling ourselves that someone else will pay the price.

We can also throw up our hands and say we can’t change anything. We complain without seeking solutions. Or complain that we’re complaining—still without seeking solutions. Because we don’t know where to start. Solving the existential problems of today’s world is hard, especially since reality isn’t a Hollywood production with a single villain. It’s what the Americans would call a clusterfuck. We’re not in a mess—we’re in many messes.

Many of the issues that keep us up at night—climate change, growing inequality, social frustration and tension, real and imagined religious and cultural conflicts, a sense of threat, fear of migration—are not root causes, but symptoms of deeper, structural processes that have been developing for decades. Which means they won’t be solved without deep, structural, and long-term responses.

The problem is, to solve today’s challenges effectively, we’d need a different world than the one we live in. Fear and powerlessness breed distrust, selfishness, and hatred. They block solidarity and shared responsibility—without which, there can be no solutions. The threats remain unresolved, generating more fear, deeper divisions, and more selfishness. And the circle closes.

Still, I believe it’s not too late. We have to start somewhere. Perhaps by addressing the wreckage caused by the last financial crisis. Although it began in 2007 and peaked around 2009, its consequences—and even more so, the consequences of how it was handled—hit hardest years later. They’re still hitting us.

The middle class—that broad band of society that, since WWII, formed the backbone of left-wing, centrist, and even conservative parties in Western democracies—was already eroding before the crisis. The culprit was the long-standing alliance between politics and economic neoliberalism. The financial crisis broke the dam. Stripped of social security, dignity, a sense of future, and of control over their lives, much of the middle class was driven into the arms of right-wing populism.

Aristotle already explained that stable democracy cannot exist without a strong middle class. His lesson that nature abhors a vacuum helps us understand how quickly a deceived and resentful public can veer ideologically. Their anger became the fuel for manipulative politics based on fear and hatred, on division and fantasies of returning to the “good old sovereign times” that never actually existed.

We need to defuse this time bomb before it unleashes its full destructive force. That won’t fix everything overnight—but it’s a precondition for turning back toward the values of solidarity, empathy, and shared responsibility. Without those, there can be no civilized social coexistence. And without that, we’ll be helpless to address every other pressing societal and global challenge.

It won’t be easy. The middle class isn’t a vase you can smash against a wall and then just glue back together. Today’s middle class is fading; the emerging one is structurally different. Workers and clerks are being replaced by people in far more fluid professional situations, many of whom will work in jobs that don’t yet exist.

If fluidity and flexibility are just softer terms for living on the edge of poverty, we’re in trouble. If we patch up the middle class at the expense of those at the bottom, we’re in even deeper trouble.

The European democratic and economic model is utterly dependent on solidarity. Populism is what happens when European politics forgets this. Neither pluralistic democracy nor market economies can survive without the support of a broad majority. And that support will vanish if most people feel like they’re systematically left behind.

Investing in social justice is investing in stability and security. Without it, we risk falling into extreme ideologies that Europe already knows too well from its past. On one side, authoritarian repression in the name of the nation; on the other, the wet dreams of Sunday revolutionaries for a replay of social utopias that only work with an iron fist.

I don’t believe either of those throwbacks would last long—but before they failed, they could still cause a great deal of harm and suffering.

This isn’t the naïve moralizing of a salon socialist. Neoliberalism is a factory of social tension and instability. It doesn’t just threaten pluralistic democracy—it also undermines the market economy. At least the kind roughly aligned with the European Social Charter or Article 2 of the Slovenian Constitution. From the standpoint of capital, neoliberalism is about short-term greed winning out over long-term interest.

But the call for more social justice isn’t about party politics. It’s not about supporting one party or another. Supporting greater solidarity, justice, and shared responsibility doesn’t mean there’s only one right approach. On the contrary—it leaves space for a wide range of solutions, ideologies, political platforms.

The added value of democracy is precisely that: a forum for competing views. Forced unity always serves uniformity. The only boundaries are the values we wrote into our constitution and invoked during our independence: the values that should prevent us from structurally pushing people into poverty—or leaving them there—and the values that allow people to live well from their work, knowledge, and talent, even to thrive.

That last part is what I wish for you in the new year—and the years after that. If you can’t get rich, I hope at least you live better. Not at the expense of others, but together with them.

May the new decade not just be a continuation of the one we’re leaving behind.

Enough with the chicken guts.