Can We Save Ourselves?
The Crisis at hand and the bigger crisis looming.
We live in a country that values personal economic success above all things. There has not been much of a collective sense of responsibility in many decades. Politics has been ceded to an economic elite and keeping busy and ignoring politics has been normalized. We are now facing a crisis wherein an elected President is trying to destroy democracy and establish a fascist authoritarian dictatorship. The resistance to this includes many in the baby boomer generation who are dedicated to restoring democracy through calling and letter writing to their elected representatives and showing up for public demonstrations. I see a smaller segment of the other generations dedicated to the same activism. As the regime acts in increasingly cruel and tyrannical ways many are asking, “what will it take for an irresistible majority to stand up and bring the regime down?” I don’t have an answer to this question. What follows is my attempt to explain some of the forces at work.
When I was studying philosophy and political science at Boston University in the 1980’s I was also reading books like, “The Population Bomb”, by Paul Ehrlich and “The Limits to Growth” by, Donella Meadows. I came to the conclusion that our industrialized civilization was not sustainable; that we were headed over a cliff and that technology would not save us. We also lacked the political will to change course. Thus in fifty to seventy-five years our society would be suffering from ever increasing instability due to the pressures that would result from population growth and resource depletion. I thought that of all the possible scenarios, societal collapse was the most probable.
As the decades passed I saw a lot of evidence that what I believed was coming to pass. The problem was that I failed to properly understand what “political instability” meant. I saw the failure of centralized national governments in some “third world” countries, but I did not make the historical and economic connection to the rise of fascism. I certainly saw some fascist and authoritarian trends in our society, but the general consensus, from the 90’s on, was that our politics were broken and that the two dominant parties were wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America. A third party only made the possibility of a minority party coming to power more probable. Tens of millions of Americans began to turn away from politics as pointless.
Over the same period of time, there were many important shifts in our culture. In the 1960’s it was still the norm for white middle class families to have one parent working and one parent managing the home. The income earned was enough to have two cars, put food on the table, pay the utilities, pay for any lessons that the children desired, employ a gardener and maid once a week, and pay for Summer camp or family vacations. By the 1980’s, two earner families were becoming the norm and the days of job security, reliable pensions that would see you into old age, and a society that was working towards a collective better future were all on the wane.
Corporations shifted from being good citizens who shared community values to individual entities that sought only to maximize profit. The mythology of the rugged individual was taking over and individuals also began to only value that which was quantifiable and economic. The loss of other than economic values in communal life was a common theme in books and articles at that time from across the political spectrum. The goal of parenting was to raise children who could compete for the highest paying jobs. In the two earner family it became a natural outgrowth that the skills learned and used in the corporate world would be applied to child rearing. Time management and optimization assured that all of the correct activities would be rigorously scheduled so that the college applications, and later resumes, would be the best possible. The child/employee was taught that nothing else mattered but economic success and politics was a waste of time.
By the year 2,000 corporate dominance of government was complete and now public policy and corporate strategy shifted their investments into “globalization”. Manufacturing in the U.S. had already been in decline for several decades and most of the middle class, unionized, manufacturing jobs had already vanished. Now, in addition to manufacturing, many service industries, engineering, and management jobs were being sent overseas to the lowest cost provider. The middle class continued to shrink and there began to be a general awareness that not only was the government broken, but that many people were getting left behind. Those entering the workforce now were not going to have the same upwardly mobile path that their parents believed was their birthright and that the “American dream” was somehow failing.
It is not surprising then that in the late ’90’s and early 2,000’s, the popularity of right wing talk radio and television exploded. Where politicians touted policy answers of more trade liberalization and less regulation, the right wing media provided scapegoats that appealed to the deep racism and baser emotions of people. Fear of the other is one of the deepest, most enduring emotions and is not only found in mankind but also in the rest of the primate world. The Republican Party took it’s first steps towards fascism by exploiting this fear of the other and calling for a return to a mythologized past. Identifying the Democratic Party as “enemies” and equating the advances made in civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the LGBTQ community with socialism and communism further divided the country into those who believed in entirely different narratives. The Democratic Party continues to rely on a narrative of better policy making as their only means of gaining support. They continue to lose the fight because they don’t recognize that the Republican Party is not making policy arguments at all. Their power derives entirely from their ability to create and control a narrative based on cultural values and emotions. The widespread adoption of the internet and the popularity of social media by around 2010 enabled the Republican Party to dominate the narrative and achieve cultural hegemony. The fissure widened into a chasm.
This brings us to where we are today. You can read people like Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Reich and learn a great deal about the historical, political, and economic forces that have shaped the world and brought about the situation that we find ourselves in. But to figure out the why of it you have to synthesize an understanding that incorporates all three and some bits of human evolutionary psychology, history of technology, and cultural awareness. We are facing an authoritarian fascist takeover of our country and the only thing that will save us is the power of the people to unify and throw off the tyranny being imposed. At the same time we have a large segment of the population that has entirely tuned out politics. They are apathetic and apolitical. Another segment has accepted the fascist narrative. Even if they don’t fully support the program, they believe the propaganda that the other side is the enemy and they support the fascist government. The resistance is divided between those that support the democratic party and believe that the only way out of the situation is through political success in the next elections, and those who believe that public demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes can bring enough pressure to bear on Congress to force them to take action to impeach and convict the President and end the regime. There is ample crossover between these groups but there are no Minutemen or militia preparing to declare their independence and defend it. There are no revolutionaries calling for the radical remaking of the government in a way that resets the course that we are on or cures the ills that have brought about the demise of democracy in the first place.
I’ve been saying since the election that Congress, the courts, and elections will not save us and that only people power can do the job. Most of the mainstream is still fixated on the courts and Congress, but many have come to realize that ALL we have that can be relied upon is people power. I don’t know if a tipping point will come. I suspect that the government will resort to ever more violent responses to demonstrations. If the government begins killing citizens in the streets it may be enough, but it could also be the end of demonstrations and the beginning of a new phase of repression of the resistance. There are many new and powerful weapons for the suppression and control of dissent in the governments hands. It is hard to predict the outcome of the chaos that would follow widespread demonstrations and violence.
A few have shared views that bringing down the regime will not be enough, but they are still devoted simply to the restoring of democracy and a restoration of the economic status quo. It won’t be enough. Slowing the train down and smoothing out the tracks a little will not prevent the train from going over the cliff if that is the course that it is on. We need to change course. It is not just the U.S.A. It is all of the advanced countries making up the industrialized civilization that we know. It will take a totally new international political organization to stamp out war, mitigate and reverse climate change, and create a sustainable civilization on earth. I hope that facing up to the fascist threat is the first step on the path to a new and better future.