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. The judiciary and elections. And I use “working” in a very, very generous sense. The judiciary isn’t “working” in the same way that, say, European courts do, expanding quality of life — not just because of extremists, but more deeply, because American legal thought stopped evolving around 1950, a variant of freshman-level economics, in which only the lowest price really matters. Nor is the election system “working” in the same way that, say, robust European proportional representation or Australian compulsory voting work. Both these systems are deeply obsolete — yet, still, they are not totally broken, shattered, or captured, in the same way that, for example, the FCC comically is. They are something like a junked out old car. Maybe, just maybe, they can get us where we want to go — make one last trip.
Because if you really understand all the above, the inevitable conclusion is simply this: America has just a handful of chances left. Maybe one or two. 2018 and 2020, let’s say. To what? To use these not-quite-totally broken-captured-or-shattered institutions, elections and the rule of law, to begin rebuilding all the other failed ones. (I won’t give you an agenda for that — I’ve written about that at length elsewhere. Here, I want you to understand the future a little.)
We say these days, if we have a modicum of common sense, that “this is not a drill”. What does that mean? It means these are the last few chances America has. Just one or two institutions are left standing. And when they all go, what happens? Well, when Hitler burned down the Riechstag, and then seized power, that was the final step in institutional collapse. But first all the other institutions in society had to collapse: the left had to capitulate an agenda to fix a broken society, the military had to let him build a private army, the civil service had to give up on managing society, media had to fail to warn of the dangers ahead, and so on. To say that just one or two institutions lean, about to topple, is also to say: a society has just a few chances left: the slightest breeze could blow it all down.
History. You and I, in this day and age, failed, stripped, decontextualized, forget the history we are not taught enough of, yet at our peril. We take it for granted that “a society” is a thing made of “working institutions” — but in fact, it is a recent, stunning development, and greatest of human accomplishments, for the two to have finally converged. First there was only tribe and war. Then Magna Carta. Then, over centuries, the birth of a free press, speech, which spread the pain in every imprisoned human soul. Then, and only then, feudalism was finally abolished — and only then painstakingly, country by country, in France, then America, and slowly, throughout Europe — though still, slavery and servitude remained. And then came the great wars — which were essentially the world seeking an order left in the void of the collapse of the old ways — empire, tribalism, nobility. Only after that war, just a few short decades ago, did Europe finally rewrite cutting-edge constitutions built on next-generation human rights: rights to healthcare, dignity, safety, employment, retirement.
Now. All this can be rewound, too. Not in the millennia it took to built it — but by a century every day, right back down to square one in just a few short years. That is precisely why the greatest of all human accomplishments, that has taken millennia of struggle, strife, war, and rebellion is this: for the difficult project of society, human coexistence, to yield freedom in order, peace in conflict, and opportunity in prosperity. Never perfectly or constantly, only in imperfect ways — yet, all that is what those two little words we take for granted, “working institutions”, mean. Let us never forget it — because the truth is that now we are just a few chances away from undoing it all, precisely because, perhaps, we have taken history, progress, and plenty for granted, we are unaware, now, of how fragile this thing we call “society” really is.
“Last chances.” What do I mean, then? I mean that history can always be rewound, suddenly, catastrophically. All people have to do is, really, fail to press the “forward button”. For history, like water, held in tension, ever seeks the void. Last chances — not just for us to “vote” or to “act”, though we should and must, but, really, to understand, know, feel, all that — and the weight it carries, placed squarely upon our weary shoulders, which is to ever lift one another up.
Think about it this way. Irreversible decline doesn’t mean forever, not at least now, only in ancient history. Today, it means something more like: a society is going into a dark place from which a revolution will then be necessary to climb out of — place in which that whole grand sweep of history above is suddenly undone. How long will it spend there? It’s hard to say. Franco’s Spain lasted a few generations, Stalin’s Russia longer. And yet both needed revolutions to undo collapse — you cannot then gradually find your way out of ruin, once you have fallen into autocracy: it takes something like an explosion.
And that is the real point. “Last chances” mean that negotiation, careful consideration, hard-won agendas, and so on, remain possible — the consensual, legitimate, democratic solutions to social and economic problems that “working institutions” mean. That is, while it might take radical ideas, put into practice one tiny step a time, a society can fix itself without revolution, upheaval, darkness, history suddenly rewinding, a century a day. But that is not true once a society’s last few working institutions finally collapse: after that point, history begins rewinding, a century a day.
And then only a revolution can undo autocracy, kleptocracy, tribalism, feudalism that grows in the void. But revolutions do not happen overnight. As in Spain and Russia and France, it takes generations for the pressure to build. And so today’s generations in America are playing with fire — things that they can be undone, but probably won’t in their lifetimes. Get it wrong, and all these lives wither and fall.
Last chances. This is it. These upcoming years, days, nights. The next five years, let us say. History, like water, obeys the law of gravity. Always falling down. But the difficult job you and I have, if we really understand history, is to lift one another up. That is the challenge that America forgot, the purpose of this strange and difficult project called society, the lesson of all the long years and short lives that came and went, and America has just a few short years, now, to remember it, with fierce gratitude and gentle rebellion.
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