Why 2018 Might Be America’s Last Chance

What History Teaches us About Ruin, Revolution, and Renewal

History is a little like water. Held in tension, it seeks the depths. If we do not pull it up, it will fall back down — and down we tumble with it. What do I mean?

Just this morning, the FCC — which is only a handful of people — voted to begin rolling back net neutrality. And it made me think: American institutions collapse daily now, starkly and openly, almost mockingly, and worst of all, in authoritarian ways — because of course while the vast majority of American people, and even businesses, want a free internet, only a tiny handful of corporations don’t.

How do societies fall into irreversible collapse? When all their institutions stop functioning, fail, either because they are broken, shattered, or captured. In the void left by functioning institutions, often the very ones they themselves have cunningly ruined, authoritarians seize power.

Let’s apply this little model to America.

FCC: Captured. A media that failed to warn of all that was come all through election year, and still uses silly, empty phrases like “fake news” and “ethnonationalism” instead of concepts with resonant, important, urgent historical meanings, like “fascism” and “propaganda” and “authoritarianism”: broken.

A Congress so poisoned by extremist ideology that the narrowest of victories against a Nazi pedophile — life becoming a teenage internet comic strip — is a cause for celebration: shattered. Intellectuals that keep telling people that “culture” is the cause of rising extremism, when it is a variable that withstands not the slightest scrutiny, because it fails the most basic test of reality, which is that democracy is failing in countries whose cultures couldn’t be more different, like America and Turkey: broken.

Businesses who now decry extremism, worry about the the place society is in, while at this very moment failing to give employees, all the way up to middle managers, a chance at a decent life, which, of course, is the point: broken.

I could go on, and discuss other institutions, the church, the military, technology, and so on, but the point is this. America has just two working institutions left…