A Slow Descent or a Sudden Plunge?

I have not posted anything since March of this year. I have left it to other commentators more erudite, informed and skillful as wordsmiths than myself  to agonize over our situation.  I hope I am proven to be overly pessimistic. But however today's election turns out the overall dynamics that I see I believe will remain in force.

 November 6. 2018

Never in my life have I had more misgivings about the future. We seem to be doomed to bitter hard times whether it's an slow descent or a sudden heart stopping plunge.  Usually it's some poor souls somewhere else but eventually everyone's turn will come. Whether it is a climate change driven fire storm or an overheated ocean spurned Category 5 hurricane, or whether it's street fighters with bandannas covering their faces hurling rocks and bottles at police or a sudden bloody ring of carnage wrought by someone armed with an assault weapon and made crazy by hatred. Whatever it is some form of  historical (and preventable) calamity will eventually track us all down. Across the globe such events seem to be erupting daily usually in the form of tribal or religious warfare. And always they are underpinned by an ever sharpening divide in wealth inequality.

This divide between factions is becoming increasingly insurmountable with many countries pushing messy democratic norms aside in favor of autocracy and 'trains running on time 'type solutions. Everywhere it's the same story the few possessing impossibly vast stores of wealth use local religious theocrats in conjunction with home grown demagogues and/or corrupt pols to manipulate the uneducated and gullible to resist any reasonable and humane approach to what is essentially an economic problem. This while the planetary resources are being pushed to their breaking point as the natural environment is ravaged and consumed. Systematic unsustainability is ignored in a mad rush to feed capitalism's monstrous appetite for growth. The only future that novelists and screenwriters can can now imagine are dysotopian nightmares – either sterile, mind controlling Orwellian police states or Mad Max barbarism on a horizon of empty desolation and dead cities. But never mind that, for the oligarchic overlords and their well paid minions, science when it cannot be teased into profitable technology, is ignored even as the warning lights flash red. Obligatory formalized acknowledgement of the 'climate change' crisis and it's dire implications is duly made but real engagement matching it's degree of seriousness remains impossible.

And to make matters worse a newly invigorated 21^st Century fascism has emerged and is normalizing itself as a legitimate political faction hiding behind the frayed banner of nationalism. The traditional mainstream centrists parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant. And the traditional left is yet to reformulate itself into something beyond simply a means of defending the remnants of social programs that resulted from capitalism's 1930s Keynesian rescue and the heady pro-labor post WWII years.

The Brit's Tories have been forced to embrace and enact the self destructive nationalistic insanity of Brexit supported by a deluded and angry working class, while its own Labor Party struggles to breath some life back into the tired discredited chimera of socialism. Here in the US the once center-right Republican Party, having sold is soul to lingering racist legacy of the old Confederacy, cynically embrace a dangerous mountebank. The once merely 'conservative' Grand Old Party that has moved so far to the right on the political spectrum that even Ronald Reagan is rolling in his grave. While the Democrats, still dazed and confused as to how they lost the presidency to such a fraud, are wondering how they allowed things to go so far 'south' (pun intended). Having long ignored a critical part of their base, the rural and rust belt trapped white working class, they now realize that they focused too much on identity politics and the placating liberals in the professional middle class. The tone deafness of the Democrats to the reality of late capitalism and its depredations on the US working class as it mutated into a heartless trade union hostile globalized version was not lost on one up and coming gifted demagogue.

When ordinary people become convinced by glib professional haters that their traditional way of life, economic livelihood and even physical safety is threatened by 'outsiders', they become mobs or sit by and watch as 'good Germans'. The reality that these so called 'invaders are' actually just ordinary people desperately fleeing the horrors of civil war, abject poverty and gang warfare is lost in the firestorm of hate fueled by fear and loathing of imaginary demons. We can only hope this fever will break before all is lost.