How Bad Could it Get? Or, The Vicious Cycle of Fascism and Collapse

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It’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind. Tara asked: “What’s the worst that could happen under another Trump Presidency?”

The how bad could it get question.

I’m still sick, so I’m going to keep this short and…not so sweet. Let me give it to you straight.

It’s not just another Trump Presidency that you should be thinking about.

It’s beyond that. I’m not trying to be clever, I’m not trying to bait you, I’m trying to help you understand how societies and civilizations work.

This is going to take a little bit of explanation, so let’s dig in.

How Bad Could it Get?

The way that we’re thinking about this question now is the framing above: what’s the worst that could happen under another Trump Presidency? It’s reasonable, understandable, given the circumstances, so let’s begin there, and then we’ll zoom out.

Go ahead and just…take that side at its word. They haven’t exactly been shy about telling us all what they want to do.

They want to, for example:

• Sharply circumscribe and erase basic freedoms for women and minorities, right down to IVF and various forms of marriage, which of course all include expression, association, privacy and many more.
• Abolish basic institutions of government, like the Department of Education, so imagine a society without public schools, I guess, or at least of a calibre of a much poorer society.
• Purge government and replace it with loyalists, from top to bottom.
• Eviscerate the rule of law, which they’ve already done, of course, turning the Supreme Court into a mere vessel.

I could go on. Attacking opponents, sham trials and investigations, crackdowns on dissent, the transformation of basic institutions from democratic to repressive ones.

But is that really the worst that could happen?

The sort of chilling answer to that is: no, not even close.

The Worst That Could Happen

Now we’re going to get real.

Don’t read this if you’re already freaked out about the election. I’m not kidding. Go read a book, play with your dog, whatever. This is going to be scary.

We’ve been talking about Keynes a great deal. He’s the figure who understood what caused fascism. Way back in the 1930s.

I’ve explained that Keynes’ great insight was that stagnation causes fascism. And America’s undergone a prolonged period of stagnation verging on half a century by now—incomes for men have stagnated since 1979. Among many, many other dire indicators.

So that’s what helped me predict American democracy collapsing.

But Keynes great insight also had another facet to it.

Stagnation causes fascism, but fascism also causes stagnation.

It’s a vicious cycle.

Now let’s come back to another term. And we can discuss it in a much, much more sophisticated way.

Trump wants to blow up the global economy. Just implode it. Tariffs of whatever hundred or thousand percent on everything imported. Which are sure to cause retaliation or pre-emption from everyone, because of course he wants to impose these on even America’s friends, like Europe and Canada.

Now. Forget the economics and the jargon. Just think of the 1930s. What happened back then?

We had exactly such a wave of isolationism. Retaliation. Barriers arose, to trade, to people, for opportunities, of all kinds. And as this cycle accelerated, what happened?

The Great Depression did.

We’ll discuss this more in the next few days, but what another term promises is on that level.

We will probably see, if these plans are enacted, something like a wave of depressions sweep across the globe.

America is the world’s number one consumer. We can criticize that all we like, but the fact is that the global economy depends on it to consume. Now imagine one where that doesn’t happen, because tariffs are at a thousand percent or what have you. What happens? Everyone’s economy goes into a tailspin.

Including, of course, America’s, because imagine that all that imported stuff you buy, from clothes to household goods to food suddenly costing you twice, three times as much.

Sound painful? It will be, but that’s not really the point.

The point is that this is a repeat of the 1930s, to an extreme degree.

But that’s still not the worst that could happen.

It’s just the setup, really.

What Was the Worst That Could Happen in the 1930s?

So. Now you should understand the point I’m trying to make, but let me spell it out.

So far, we’re here in the cycle of history. Stagnation causes fascism. That’s America from 1979 to 2024, roughly.

But the next part of the cycle is this.

Fascism causes stagnation.

And as that sets in, what results? Depressions do. Doesn’t matter if our failing economic stats don’t call them depressions—that’s just a statistical illusion at this point. That is what they’ll be.

And what do depressions do?

They accelerate fascism, harden it, turbo-charge it, intensify it.

At this point, perhaps you see where I’m going. Or maybe you don’t. Let me now spell it out.

The worst that could happen isn’t just “another term.” Not really.

Let’s think about the abuses and horrors that nobody much would have believed possible in 1929. Holocaust, World War, all over again, Nazism, a world coming undone.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Let me try to make it clearer still.

Fascism causes stagnation, but stagnation causes fascism. We’re in the first part of the cycle, transitioning into the second. The true horrors and abuses come in the second part of the cycle.

They tend to be unimaginable in the first.

Can we imagine an America where people are…ethnically cleansed? Where people are made unpeople? What about one where a dictator can remove citizenship from hated social groups all at once?

Let’s put that even more sharply. Nuremberg Laws. Genocide. Institutionalized hate. Society divided into superhumans and subhumans.

Is that kind of horror possible? Of course it is, after all, the Nazis studied American slavery.

The Worst That Could Happen is Still (Much) Worse Than We’re Imagining

The worst that could happen is still way, way beyond what Americans are imagining.

American thinking tends to be short-term. It tends to stay within very narrow realms of what’s possible. That’s OK, at times, it lends America a kind of pragmatism.

But at times like this, it’s not conducive to thinking well.

Right now, the warnings about fascism are being sounded, finally, loud and clear.

But are they really warnings?

When we say that fascism is on the horizon, we shouldn’t just understand it to mean something like lightweight dictatorship, temporary martial law, protestors being carted off, or even illegal immigrants being expelled.

Those things aren’t really that fascist.

We should be imagining far, far worse. Hate turned into norms and institutionalized, given power and rank and title. Nuremberg Laws. Apartheid. Right down to genocide.

Fascism carries those meanings.

But I don’t think that is the way these warnings are meant. Not really. When his former Chief of Staff or what have you say that “Trump’s a fascist,” do they really mean he’s going to carry out a genocide? Pretty dubious, and sure, you can raise the obvious left-wing objection if you want.

So these warnings are still pretty mild.

And yet they’re accurate, in a sense. It isn’t going to be Trump, perhaps, who takes America all the way down that road, if things get “that bad.” It’s dubious that it’d happen in the next few years, this level of horror, I’d say.

But it might, could, and if this is the road that’s chosen, will be the figure that succeeds him. Whomever that is. And the truth is that figures in this sense don’t matter. History chooses them, and if one doesn’t rise to the occasion, isn’t capable of such monstrosity, another will. For the structural reasons we’ve discussed above.

The worst that could happen.

Are you really thinking about it? Do you really want to? I suppose we all should, but if we want to do it, let’s do it clearly, well, and without kidding ourselves.

The worst that could happen is way, way worse than we’re imagining. It’s what happened the last time the world went down this road, and we’re still not really in a place where we think to ourselves that that could “happen here.” All the horrors of the 1930s.

And yet this is precisely, eerily, the path we’re on. From the isolationism to the nationalism to the stagnation. Curdling into depression, by way of the old vicious cycle. Depressions harden fascism.

And as fascism hardens?

That’s when the unthinkable and unimaginable start to become real.

I’m sorry if I scared you. But I want to give it to you straight. This is the time to consider and reflect on all this, and change your life while you can.

Lots of love from me and Snowy.

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