Stopping American Collapse Was Always a Long Shot. But the Democrats are Barely Even Trying.
Oct 12, 2021
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Getting a little nervous right about now? It’s becoming easier, by the day, to see Donald Trump heading back, triumphantly, to the White House. And his followers, emboldened, going absolutely mental.Uh oh.
I have some mildly good news, some pretty bad news, and some fairly terrible news. Here’s the bad news.
If the election were held today — the 2024 Presidential election — Joe Biden wouldprobably lose. To…Donald Trump.
Here’s the mildly good news. The election isn’t today. That’s cold comfort though — a relief, but only of the fleeting, anxiety-inducing kind. What it isn’t isresolution.
Let me then come to the fairly terrible news.America’s chances of really staving off fascist collapsewere always low— and what’s happening right now is that you’re seeing, the hard way, exactlywhy and how. Translation: At this rate, yes, Trump is going to win again.
Let’s talk about it, and forgive me, because this going to be a tough read.There’s a brutal, unforgiving reality behind the facts above, and it goes much, much deeper than Americans are taught to suppose. It goes like this.
America’s up against something much, much bigger than it really understands. Something bigger and far more powerful than elections, money, gridlock, popularity — all the daily noise. It’s the stuff which shapes anddeterminesall that.
America is up against a set ofsociohistoricalforces.Think of those sociohistorical forces as deep, vast ocean currents, on which all of us — even politicians and Presidents — are mere swimmers, being tossed around. That’s what Joe Biden’s really up against — and the nations is too. Sociohistorical forces are much, much greater and deeper than Americans imagine.
Sociohistorical forces mean that America’s chances of averting collapse by way of fascism were and are slender, at best — and that reality iswhyBiden is failing, andTrump is rising again.
Let me explain that, because it’s still really abstract and probably hard to grasp. So.
How was it that folkslike mewere able topredicttheriseof Trumpism — while every single pundit and columnist under the sun got it so badlywrong?That’s not point-scoring on my end — it’s about teaching you how to think well about societies, especially faltering ones. Remember: Trump was dismissed as a buffoon. Hillary’s emails were painted as the bigger threat. To warn of Trumpism rising as a force fundamentally inimical to American democracy — that got folks like me attacked as “alarmists” and “hysterics” from the very people whose job it was to think about such things well. America failed catastrophically to see Trumpism coming. So how did some of us see it?
Well, those of us who are versed in social collapse understand the power and gravity of sociohistorical forces. Deep currents. What predicted Trumpism was the most fundamental kind of sociohistorical force of all:poverty.
Around 2010, something genuinely startling happened: America’s vaunted,famed middle class…became a minority for the first time.Uh oh. That should have rung alarm bells for America’s thinking class in general. It didn’t. Only for a tiny set of people like me, Sarah Kendzior, and others — survivors and scholars of authoritarianism. For us, it screamed like a nine-alarm fire.Fascism was on the way.
Whatisa social collapse? Well, just think about it…literally. It means that a society’sstructurecollapses. A healthy society has a small number of poor, a broad, bell-curve of a middle class, and a tiny number of not-too-rich. But by 2010, something dark and terrible was happening in America. The middle class was collapsing. The working class was imploding. These were elementary statistics — not some figment of my or anyone else’s fevered imagination. So why were they ignored?
Becauseit can’t happen here. The next element of social collapse that you need to understand has two components.One, the shrugging dismissal of elites — so what? And the denial of the average person. They go hand in hand. Average people take their cues from elites, and so by shrugging at blinking-bright-red indicators of collapse, elites teach people to tune out the imminent collapse of their own societies, too. Elites, of course, try to ignore such indicators because, well, they’d have to take some responsibility for misgovernance and corruption and malfeasance and incompetence, and nobody wants to do that.
That’s how Trump came to be dismissed in America the first time around.The fatal combination of denial and deliberate dismissal by elites and average liberals. What did that pave the way for?Trumpism. You see, because elites and liberals were busy dismissing and denying the woeful state of America, that left only one person to really talk abouthow bad life had gotten: Donald Trump.
Trump, in turn, was eminently predictable, too. What did that single statistic — the middle class collapsing — predict?Fascism. What did that mean in practice? That a demagogue would arise, who’d blame the woes of the average person on long-hated minorities. The demagogue would scapegoat the groups at the bottom of the social ladder for the travails and struggles of the “true” citizen, the one of pure blood and faith, whose life was by now beginning to fall apart — because of course, a “collapsing middle class” isn’t just an abstraction, but a story of poverty, fear, despair, and rage that’s played outmillions of times over.
And that’sexactly what happened. Trump did go on to scapegoat and demonise minorities for the woes of the pure blooded and true of faith. Immediately,fascism began. Kids were torn from their parents and put intoconcentration camps. Ethnicities werebanned. Minorities werehunted downin the streets. It took America far, far too long to recognise the danger it was in. For the first several years of Trump’s Presidency, nobody much, especially nobody much in power, could bring themselves to say the wordfascism.
Whilekids were being put into concentration camps.
What did that — yet more denial — pave the way for? Even worse abuses of power.Like the culmination of all the above — thecoup attempt on Jan 6th. There were several, in fact, and here, too, the theory predicted it all neatly. First there’d be a soft coup attempt — a legislative one — and if that failed, then a hard one. When Trump’s minions couldn’t stop the vote procedurally, he incited a mob of literal supremacists tostorm Congress. That hard coup resulted inblood on the steps of the Capitol— something that wasn’t remotely seen to be possible just a few short years before.
America came within a breath of the last stages of a fascist collapse.A handful of brave Capitol Police officers managed to defend it and divert the supremacists away from their intended goal and target:stopping the Presidential vote count by massacring anyone in their way. Again, that’s not my opinion: that’sliterally what those officers testified to in Congress. It’s why Trump’s lieutenants areignoring subpoenasat this very moment — because they know they’d have to damn themselves if they opened their mouths.
So.Sociohistorical forces.
If you really understood them, you could have predicted itall. From Trump’s election, to the abuses of power, to the way they escalated, to the hard coup attempt on Jan 6th. You could have seen it all coming. And America’s thinking class should haveseen all that coming. If folks like me could, why didn’t they?
Because they’re not versed in this theory. Where does this theory come from? Well, the European left. You see, Marx made a bold prediction, which you’re probably aware of. Oppress and exploit the proles enough — and there’ll be a glorious socialist revolution, in which they take back power. Unfortunately for us, Marx was right about many things — but wrong about this one, his idea of the endpoint of history.
The prolesdorevolt when they’re exploited hard enough — but it’s not a socialist revolution, it’s afascist implosion.
The European left learned that lesson the hardest way of all.They were horrified to discover it as the Weimar Republic — a collapsing Germany, exploited to the bone — turned toNazism. Marx’s theory should have predicted the sudden development of socialism, or perhaps, as many of his acolytes massaged his theory to say, the smooth rise of social democracy. But that is not what happened at all. Instead of a sudden, sharp slide into abject poverty making Germany socialist, it turned it hardcorefascist.
What did poverty do? It seemed to make all those good Germans lose their minds. They turned on the social groups that were already at the bottom, already viewed with suspicion.The average German suddenly began to support projects like war and genocide against Jews, gay people, anyone different. They bought Hitler’s line that they were the chosen-but-long-persecuted Ubermen, who only had to prove their supremacy with cruelty and violence, to take their rightful place atop everything. Bang.Fascism.
Whydid poverty make Germans turn on each other? Because that is what poverty does. Imagine that you expect a better life than your grandparents. And instead, there you are, living a worse one. Every day has become a bitter, brutal struggle for survival. Who do you blame? Well, you’re already angry, life is already about enemies and adversaries, whom you have to fend off for bread, medicine, a place to live, a tiny bit of money. It doesn’t take much of a push to whisper to you — “Hey, buddy. It’stheirfault. You know, the ones who’ve never reallybelongedhere. They took the things you should have. It’s their fault your life fell apart. All we have to do is get rid of them — and we’ll be pure again, supreme, cleansed and triumphant.”
Ahh, what a relief. What a simple story.How comfortable it is to believe it. Because if it’s their fault, then it’s notyours.Its not the fault of those venalelites you supported. It’s the fault of people who are already under a cloud of suspicion, and always have been. Bang. Society implodes into hate, violence, and bloodlust, by way of these foundational Big Lies. (And as these Big Lies gather momentum, even bigger ones supplant them — like “that wasn’t a coup, it was a peaceful protest,” or “the election was stolen from us.”)
That’s not just the story of Weimar Germany. It’s also the story of America.Allof it. From the collapsing middle class, to the demagogue, to the minorities scapegoated for the woes of the pure of blood and true of faith, to the actual fascism — camps, torture, minorities hunted in the streets, a maniac demagogue screaming in rage.
Sociohistorical forces. If you really understood them, you could have predicted America’s future in painful, eerie detail.American thinkers failed at that because those of us educated in Europe were taught about sociohistorical forces, and theyweren’t.
All of that brings me squarely back to Joe Biden and the Democrats.
The narrative Americans are being presented with goes like this.
Biden’s approval rating is plummeting. He’s had a terrible summer of self-inflicted mistakes, of the disastrous kind. So pundits will connect the dots in a superficial way, as they tend to do — Biden’s popularity falling, meanwhile, Trump’s back at rallies, uh oh.
There’s a grain of truth in all this — but only a grain. The whole bitter harvest? It has deep, deep roots in a poisonous soil. Let me explain what I mean by all that.
Why is Biden’s Presidencyreallyfailing?Yes, it’s true that it’s about poor choices and policies and the general sense that not a whole lot is getting done, which leads to a sense of frustration. But the true problem, if you understand the immense power of sociohistorical forces, is much, much graver than all that.
The sociohistorical force which caused American collapse was the sudden slide into poverty — an imploding middle class. How do you fix that? Well, there’s only one way. Through a serious and immense project ofsocial reconstruction.
That is the Democrats’real challenge. And so far, they show no signs ofunderstanding it, let alone doing anything about it.No, all those infrastructure bills and whatnot are not attempts at social reconstruction. They are like putting band-aids on a cancer patient.Not remotely close to enough.
How big are we talking? Well, if America hadn’t had the New Deal, it might well have fallen to fascism in the 30s just like Germany did. But the New Dealwas abouthalf of the economy. Biden’s agenda is 2% of it.And the Democrats can’t even get that passed.
At this point, American liberals will probably be getting pretty angry with me. Throwing their hands up, they’ll shout, “But it’s not our fault! There are obstructionists in our party!” There are, true. But again,that’s not my point. What is my point?
This is how Trump wins again. All of this and exactly this.The agenda that didn’t really come close to a proper attempt at social reconstruction — but onlygot 2% of the way there. LOL — 2%! A party thatcan’t even get that 2% passed. All that is exactly and precisely how even the simplest analysis based in sociohistorical forces says: Trump wins again.
Because without serious and meaningful andrealsocial reconstruction, there has never been a society in history that has staved off further collapse, from Rome to Germany.2% is not enough.
Again, that’s not some kind of angry insult aimed at the Dems. I get it. They’re corrupt, they don’t have the backbone, they don’t have the wisdom to really understand what they’re up against. Shrug.
It’s an observation, that I have to make a little coldly, unemotionally — and aprediction. This is how Trump wins, all over again.
You can see it happening, by the way, already. People are getting frustrated with the Dems — but not just any old people.They very ones they need most.The very groups who put them over the top last time are beginning to sigh in resignation and shrug fatalistically. They are less and less likely to turn out every single day. Which groups are those? Minorities, Black voters, young people. Even a tiny, tiny margin of difference in those groups — a slight fall in turnout — meansTrump wins.
Those groups may not be able to verbalise all the grand theory the way I have. So what? Their frustration is no lessreal. They know it intuitively. 2% isn’t enough — and these fools, these jokers, these inept clowns…they can’t even get that done. They’re beginning to roll their eyes and walk away. That’s why Biden’s approval ratings are falling.
The sense of frustration emanating from the groups the Dems need most, in turn, is beginning to result in the worst case scenario. The Democrats fragile coalition issplintering. It was always going to be tough to hold together — but that was America’s only hope.
And yet, properly understood, it was a slender hope. Most failing societies cannot get it together enough to pass or even attempt true social reconstruction. Most failing societies end up right where America is: attempting a tiny sliver of what’s needed — 2% — and failing even at that. That is what makes them, literally,failing societies.
That is why: sociohistorical forces are almost impossible to fight. They’re like spending a lifetime sitting on the couch and smoking and eating junk-food — and then trying to run a marathon. Sure, there might be one person who can cross the finish line — but the other 999 are going todrop dead of a heart attack.
That’s why, though it’s a thankless and impolite task, I have to warn you.America’s chances of really staving off fascist collapse were always low — and you are watching them dwindle to nothing by the day now. 2%? Not enough. Can’t even get that much done? LOL — good luck, enjoy it when the Nazis knock at your door in about three years or so and ask for your proof of blood purity.
This is how Trump wins again. Not just because the Dems are blowing it — but because they don’t even know what they really should be fighting.They need to be fighting history, for it, against it — and so far, they don’t even understand how to fight fortoday. What chance does that really give America?
UmairOctober 2021
