IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU

From here on the ground, pundits spill millions of words explaining the worldwide resurgence of populism, demagoguery, and tyranny. They wonder whether these scourges, considered largely vanquished by the middle of the 20th century, are fated to perpetually cycle back.

The higher-level view, from 50 years hence, will take thousands of words to explain the contributing factors, extenuating circumstances, and rare opportunities that coincided to make this surprising development possible. Unique circumstance sparked the unthinkable for a brief and catastrophic while.

But the highest level view, with the distance of a century or two, will - like all high-level views - fit on a postcard:

Humanism, pluralism, and technocracy were surging worldwide, pushing cruelty, racism, and ignorance toward irrelevance. But every leap triggers a recoil. Unable to maintain power within systems as they stood, oppositional parties stopped seeing democracy as a game in which they could compete, and sought alternative ways to preserve their side of the binary.

The timeworn sinister machinery - division, demagoguery, lies, conspiracy theories, yellow journalism, voter suppression, dark nostalgia, and personality cult - was dusted off and trotted out, and it served for a time. Hyper-aroused transgressive political minorities briefly seized power around the world and installed weakly buffoonish kakistocracies. Essentially dug in against Modernity, they had no better plan and no interest in good governance.

But the underlying mechanisms remained in play. Long-term demographic, intellectual, and moral shifts continued to overtake this segment. Most devastating of all was the short-term reality that these movements were stoked disproportionally by older people, fated to swiftly dwindle. To put it mildly, they did not go gentle into that good night.

This won't be recounted as a tale of left vs right; liberal vs conservative. Already these terms have been hollowed out, revealing the purely tribal basis of the schism.


Back in 2017 I called it a last gasp. In The Un-Self-Aware Assholes’ Last Hurrah, I wrote:

We’re getting a front row view of something few people have seen in person. it’s usually only read about. And it’s somewhat defanged; we won’t fall into autocracy, we won’t lose our freedom, it’s not the third reich ... [I've self-servingly cut out predictions that didn't come true]...and, luckiest of all, the bad guys are self-defeating idiots.

There will be more chaos and chagrin, but we’re getting this view relatively cheaply. When it’s over, center left and center right will come together (it’s already started…pro-Trump stats are so high among Republicans because so many Republicans have renounced their party). This is a last gasp of moldy human tropes; the un-self-aware assholes’ last hurrah...It’s not the end of the world, it’s birth pangs for a new better one.

Since the mid 20th century, we'd felt inoculated against these moldy remnants, an assurance that proved sadly wrong. But that's not to say we're trapped in an inescapable cycle. On the contrary, we're winning. Pluralistic humanism is now the majority credo, despite the political aberration. But a last gasp is still appalling to endure. Pity our innumerable forebears who lived, stiflingly, through forgotten periods of senseless idiocy within otherwise enlightened eras. “The one rotten king” may not do permanent damage, but a generation is an eternity for those stuck in it.

But though we're evolving in fits and starts (this now would be a "fit"), we'll never be fully inoculated. So the key message for posterity is that we are not primitives. We're not some lower breed, unusually blind and stupid. And this means that you, my great-great-great-great grandchildren, may come to watch a huge chunk of your society wrap itself around some fecal doo-dah. Yes, you may flit around in flying cars, google searching within your minds, but you're no more "modern" than we were.

So while this moment of utter buffoonery - perfectly exemplified by a nihilistic clown of a prime minister being strapped into a ventilator weeks after petardedly poo-pooing a pandemic - will make for hilarious reading in a century or two, and we are very much the nutty ancients whom the future will mock, they need to know they aren’t inoculated.

There's always an opposition. Society always produces an opposing faction, even anti-paradise. And once a faction is shamed and shouted down, they will fight dirty. Whenever a critical mass finds its back against the wall, the old machinery may be reached for. And it will always be available. The bell can’t be unstruck.

I called this way back in the late 1990s, when Gingrich and his band of pirates were crapping all over DC, and the DNC hit me up for a donation to stop them. I knew the treasurer, who'd sent the email pitch, a little, and I pushed back, insisting that it was far more critical to support sane Republicans against the radical loonies. He refused to take my point, able to see only the binary. And sure enough, the Republican party fell into delirium, monkey-barring from Gingrich to Limbaugh to Cheney to Palin to this toxic vacant whackjob.

So I have an idea. Let’s drag boulders, great big boulders, into a meadow somewhere and have it spell out “IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU”. Let's raise funds to get this done as a service to posterity.


See also: Historian Consensus Circa 2117 (though the above is better re: Trump).