Is This it?

I struggle with what to say to you at times like these. There’s a great deal to say, and a great deal’s being said. It’ll continue to be said. But I find myself strangely quiet.

After all, it turned out exactly like I said it would, exactly how I said it would. That’s true on micro and macro levels: I said Kamala would lose, because she ignored the economy, at least in a credible way, and of course, “American collapse” is an idea that old friends will be familiar with.

And here we are.

So is this it?

What you probably want to know is how things will change.

Before I answer that, and I will, I want to…share my reluctance. To answer questions like these anymore.

When I told you Kamala would lose, and why she’d lose, did it…change anything? I wonder that to myself. What purpose does it serve, sharing these things I know, which doesn’t mean I’m some kind of oracle, no, I don’t have mystical powers, I’m just good at my job, which is understanding things—and if I do that well, it raises the question:

Should I talk about what I know will happen next?

I made an exception when I told you Kamala would lose, because I thought you should be able to prepare yourself, and maybe it helped dull the blow a little. I don’t know, you can tell me if it did.

But over the last few months, and I’ve talked with you about this very openly, I warn less and less, because I wonder. Does it do any good? I think a world has to be ready to hear its thinkers, too, and our world doesn’t appear very interested in thinking at all these days.

So.

I’ll make another exception. I sense your pain and despair. I can feel it in the strange silence on the streets. The way even my neighbors barely make small talk these days. I’m not in America, and yet the distress is felt around the world.

Everyone’s eyes ask me the same question.

Is this it?

I’m going to answer that for you, but. Stop reading here if you’re not ready for the answer.

Is This It? Or, How Society Will Change

Let me answer this first on a micro-level. The micro-level means: is this the final stage of American collapse, is this it for American democracy, etcetera.

The answer to that question is: yes.

That’s an ugly, terrible, obscene thing to have to write. But I have to answer you, and in a sense, I have to bring to a conclusion this idea I began discussing so long ago, American collapse.

So. Yes. America is now on the path to autocracy. How far down that path it goes is of course up to a certain person, but that’s exactly what autocracy is.

How far will things go? We don’t know for certain. But we do have some guides, which are useful, lodestones of a sort. How far into autocracy have other nations slunk? The comparative examples aren’t good. When nations make choices like these, they tend to slide very, very far into autocracy, very fast. Do I need to name the nations? I won’t, because of course, you should know them all too well by now.

What happens in situations like these is that a vicious cycle tends to erupt.

I emphasize that for three reasons, which I’ll highlight before I explain it. One, America still thinks its immune to it, two, America’s liberals don’t really believe they’ve lost anything for good yet, and three, they won’t believe that until it’s too late, which it already is, but will be even more so, and that brings me back to the vicious cycle.

It goes like this. Autocrats tend to put in place self-destructive economic policies, usually based around nationalism. As those backfire, never quite working out the way they were supposed to—various forms of protectionism or cronyism—something even more dramatic and disturbing happens. Attacks on rights tend to intensify, in order to mask this loss of economic vitality.

Scapegoats are found, and blamed, in an accelerating cycle. Demagogues raise more barriers, enact more self-destructive economic plans. They don’t work. Attacks on rights and freedoms accelerate even more, in order to spread the blame, point the finger, at anyone else.

This is what happened in the 1930s.

This is America’s probable future. The most likely one. How likely is “most likely”? I’d say all but inevitable at this point. This vicious cycle is likely to characterize the next several years, probably the next decade, because once it starts, it’s incredibly hard to stop.

It takes on a momentum of its own, in other words. In plainer English, that means a society becomes obsessed with the mission of finding others to blame for its lack of success, vitality, and prosperity, even as that very act only deepens and prolongs their absence, because it accomplishes nothing constructive.

How “bad” is all that?

Think again with me of the 1930s. How bad was it then?

In that widening gyre, the whirlpool of this vicious cycle, a society can lose itself faster than it knows.

Now let me name this cycle. Stagnation-depression-autocracy.

When this cycle erupts, a society can become unrecognizable in a matter of years. Basic freedoms and rights can simply be eviscerated, and end up not just distant memories, but things people don’t want anyone to have. The democratic ideals of freedom, justice, peace, and equality are quickly pulled into the undertow, and vanish into the depths.

This is an incredibly perilous place for a society to be.

It is a post-collapse place. The collapse is what allows a society to approach the brink of this terrible gyre. But once it enters this whirlpool, the next phase is implosion.

This is where things stand now.

Nobody can say how fast, furious, or violent it could all be. But history doesn’t offer us much reassurance. I won’t offer you the obvious examples from the 1920s and 1930s, you can think of more modern ones still. When societies in more recent times have fallen into this trap, how many have escaped unscathed? Most that have remain autocracies, and never quite regain their former standing, senses, or place in the world. Worse, as they lose the spirit of democracy, they become something darker, too.

I’m trying to convey this to you as concisely as I can. I don’t know if I’m succeeding.

Let me try again, even more simply. What happens next is that the vicious cycle of autocracy and stagnation intensifies, and as it does, a society can become unrecognizable to itself much, much faster than anyone even now, at this point, believes possible. History teaches us that the number of societies which escape this path, standing on the edge of the whirlpool, able to extricate themselves from its gravity—is almost nil.

That is what happens next.

Let me tell you what also happens next. Some of you don’t “believe” me, just as you didn’t when I explained why Kamala would lose, or any number of other examples. I’m not complaining or judging you for it, I’m just observing gently. And I encourage you not to be naive this time. Because this time you probably don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong. So I don’t say this for my sake, I made my plans long ago, having predicted all this, I say it for yours.

Is This it? Or, How Life Will Change

Now let’s explore the question—what happens next?—on an institutional level.

What else happens next? I want you to understand a concept I’ll call asymmetrical change.

Let me try and elucidate it.

In one respect, nothing much will change.

The Democrats won’t fire anyone. The New York Times and Washington Post won’t change their columnists. CNN won’t alter its coverage. And on and on.

So—and this is the head-spinning part—institutions, having failed, and failed this badly, won’t change.

That will create the illusion of a kind of stability, but this isn’t true stability at all, of course—institutions that go on not protecting anyone from anything. It’s just a mirage that looks like stability.

That will make life seem very, very strange.

Because at the same time, there will be changes, radical and profound.

The nature of governance is about to change dramatically. If the various changes to government that are imagined go ahead, that will be the single most dramatic change to American governance since the end of the Civil War, most likely.

The economy will change, dramatically, too. Tariffs and protectionism—we’ll discuss later if they’ll “work”—will have sweeping effects, and many of those won’t be positive, and of course the very team who hopes to enact them acknowledges a “period of pain” or what have you, a kind of cure that’s worse than the disease, or at least something like a very, very painful surgery.

But more than all that, society will change.

Americans have never experienced social collapse, and of course, as social scientists, we can only sort of talk about it in anodyne terms. But as a witness to and survivor of it, what I know is that collapses change the way societies feel.

People stop talking out loud. They look at one another with suspicion. Eyes go blank. Words are chosen carefully. Friendships are never formed, old ones broken, and the social fabric comes undone.

Life becomes something that feels very different to life in a proper democracy. It’s not friendly, easy, open, or carefree, and of course, those are relative terms, and they’re terms about the ways people feel, not all the time, but just as sort of mundane levels of everyday experience. In democracies, by and large, we feel…OK. Good. Not terrible.

But autocracies aren’t like that. Life feels different. People are cruel. They can’t be counted on, because of course, who knows, they might be punished themselves. Norms of justice and truth and peace don’t exist, by design, because intimidation and punishment are how such societies work. Feeling good in the open isn’t really allowed, valued, or wanted. You’re supposed to walk around with a blank look on your face, not a smile. You don’t say hello and mean it, you only say it to the right people, and in a way that wins you political currency, that signals you’re safe, one of the true and pure, etcetera.

So the most dramatic change is in how life will feel.

American life hasn’t felt good for a while. I know that. But it hasn’t felt like this either. Life in an autocracy feels bleak, and as that happens to people, something curdles inside them. They harden, become even more individualistic, lose their backbones, stop questioning, grow incurious, accept whatever daily indignity is thrown at them, and ultimately, join in the ritual punishments and purifications that make up what’s left of public and social life.

All of this is impossible to comprehend from the place a society’s in before the stage of implosion. And so we’re left at the old impasse. Should I warn you? Does it serve any purpose? Can you try to imagine what I’m discussing, as alien as it is?

This is asymmetrical change. Failed institutions go on. They pretend they haven’t fail. Nobody in them even changes much. You’ll read, see, hear…the same old people. They’ll trot out the same lines, mostly. It’ll all feel…pretty normal.

Until you step outside, and realize that nothing’s the same. That indeed, a dramatic reconstruction is under way. A deconstruction.

A total one. With a “total” mission. Total means: reaching everyone, into every aspect of everyone’s life, into every aspect of everyone’s life for the smallest reason, deviance, divergence, impurity, none of which can be permitted. This is what a totalitarian society is, and it is where autocracies inherently want to go, their natural telos, the endpoint of their devolution.

My Heart Is Broken Into a Million Pieces

I’ve said too much, and I haven’t said enough.

I wonder. You can tell me. Does answering these questions mean anything? Does it matter? But let me tell you why, now, I ask myself these questions.

You’ve read over the last few months how I feel I’ve failed, and the sense of emptiness I have about it, this sense of despair I’ve emanated, this terrible grief I’ve experienced. It’s been unbearable. Perhaps now you understand why.

I knew this was going to happen.

Now you do too.

And now, perhaps, you understand, why I’m reluctant to share with you what I know, my predictions, my warnings. It isn’t because I want to be unkind.

I don’t want them to do to you what they do to me.

Lots of love from me and Snowy.

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