It's The End Of The World As We Know It
Editorial Staff Writer
Whether you expected the re-election of Donald Trump, thought the continuation of the Biden/Harris regime was morally compromised, or were shocked to find that the values of liberal democracy failed when pitted against strong man autocracy and the promise of cheaper eggs, there is no denying the precipice on which we are collectively poised.
Since the November’s election, the interregnum period has been filled with narratives of anxious speculation and desperate contingency planning, alongside naive “copium” from some, as many others disconnect and succumb to rampant numbness, nihilism, and willful ignorance. In southern California, all these reactions were suddenly overcome by the stark existential threat of historically catastrophic wildfires in the last week, offering a vision of worst-case scenarios and devastation few could be prepared for.
Tens of thousands are homeless (alongside the tens of thousand who already were). Multigenerational homes and the histories they represent— entire neighborhoods— lay flattened, still smoldering as toxic ash and dust drift across the mountains and valleys.
As soon as the fires ignited reactionary extremists: religious, nationalist, political, anti-state— the full coalition of those whose worldviews are already predicated on fire, brimstone, persecution delusions and vengeance— began to spin conspiracy theories about weather manipulation, Democratic party corruption, the wrath of God, and the machinations of omnipresent “communists.” Republican party members and Fox news pundits debated whether aid to California should be conditioned on compliance with far right demands, while those of us still within the ongoing crisis, surrounded by very real wreckage, face a version of a new reality, one just slightly more immediate than that which all of us together now see looming, just a day away.
We cannot pretend any more that the coming threats are simply the Trump iteration of the Republican party, or that the supposed norms or legacies of our institutions can withstand those threats, or protect anything— not the most vulnerable amongst us, not the enshrined values or principles of whatever the United States is imagined to represent.
To reckon with what is coming we have to look deeper and wider— to see and admit that Trump and his cadre are not an aberration, but an outgrowth of sixty years of disparate, but overlapping veins of hierarchy, discontent, bigotry, supremacy, militarism, and apocalyptic imagination, now unified, institutionalized, and activated (160 years if we’re being honest, back to the failures and capitulation of Reconstruction).
An old story, told most famously by David Foster Wallace, goes like this:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
It’s long past time for arguments about whether fascism approaches, or whether that is even the right word, technically, for what’s happening in this unique new version of democratic collapse. Semantic arguments can’t get us any more clarity or understanding about who we are, where we are, what we face. This is water.
Recent attempts to grapple with the rise of Christian nationalism, radicalized paramilitary groups, or even Leonard Leo and his trad Catholic takeover of the Supreme Court do not capture the scope or reach or institutionalized hegemony that has consolidated its networks, depoliticized the mainstream, eroded faith in media, science, and government, and through weaponized dis- and misinformation built an impermeable bubble in which its adherents live- divorced from fact-based reality and obsessed with a dual sense of victimhood alongside increasing authority and influence.
It’s time to catch up. It’s time to look back so that we have some hope of looking forward. We are not the first democracy to collapse under the weight of its own fears, prejudices, and the vicious pursuit of some to control the many. Our own history tells the story of how we got here, and our own era’s unwillingness or inability to connect the dots from the past to the present constrain our perspectives and our sense of possibility.
As we move unstoppably into the next stage of our collapse and as the onslaught of the new administration begins, many will be consumed only with survival. For those with any distance or protection from the coming offensive, the responsibility must be on rapid re-education and re-orientation. Our old strategies and factions and sub-groups will not be enough. Neither punching Nazis nor electoral processes will save us, nor is there any hope if we can’t shake the poison of infighting and purity testing.
For those who want to understand the complex and longstanding projects that have collaborated and nurtured each other to become the polluted water in which we swim, perspectives can be honed and informed through the strategies and networks of the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation, Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority— the power brokers, intellectuals, political theorists and financial power which have moved our socio-political lodestars, defunded our social safety nets, and fragmented our sense of collective responsibility and community care.
We have to see how these efforts relied upon the politicization of religion and activation of religious communities in service of political goals— in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and others who promise divine purpose, spiritual warfare, and apocalyptic salvation.
We have to look at the white supremacist, nationalist radicalization that is born in our military and foreign wars- from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan and how these links emboldened groups ranging from the Klan to the Proud Boys to 3 percenters and other paramilitary groups. From here we must recognize the links between technological innovation and the military industrial complex- from the rocket generation post-WWII to the present day silicon Valley tech-bros currently competing with legacy giants like Lockheed Martin— and their links to the John Birch Society, anti-communism, and increasing privatization of public resources.
We have to accept the continuum from Ruby Ridge and Waco to Oklahoma City to January 6th, and from the anti-integration protests of Birmingham, Alabama to bussing riots in Boston to violent outbursts against inclusive school curriculum in Chino and North Hollywood and Glendale, California; and the unbroken threads that link Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly to Moms for Liberty, and the Red Scare to crackdowns on campus speech.
And finally, as we root ourselves in deeper knowledge and recognize the reality, nature, and patterns of the water we’re in, we have to look to those who have been immersed in it before- both those who swam to survival and those who were drowned: Victor Frankl, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco, Edward Said, Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Masha Gessen, Paolo Freire, Pablo Neruda, George Orwell, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Octavia Butler, and so many others. We have to look to Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra, to Milton Mayer and the lessons of They Thought They Were Free, to the Freedom Riders, to Stonewall, to the Jane Collective, to Border Angels.
From there, it’s on us, to take these examples and lessons from the past and use them to be and build what we need, one network, neighborhood, and community at a time.
It may be the end of the world as we know it, but a better world is still, and always, possible. We have to see that possibility and act in its service, whether we survive to see it born or not.
“…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” – Octavia Butler
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