If modern history has taught us one lesson, it’s that economic uncertainty and general downward-trending standards of living tend to cause political disruption. Sustained contraction exacerbates the crush and instability. Add the slam of climate change – for example, the long-term drought in northeastern Syria that displaced and disenfranchised legions of hapless farmers who became the backbone of the rebellion – and you are moving into a perfect storm of anger, bitterness and, most of all, fear. People want answers, and slogans promising easy and linear solutions empower the forces that enabled Hitler to rule Germany, recruits to flock to Taliban and al Qaeda (itself factionalizing into even more extreme elements), and cowering souls who worship the ground that Vladimir Putin walks on. Hundreds of millions also turn to God to fix what they cannot understand.
Incumbents struggle to set their advantages in a world of dwindling access to the resources necessary to feed a growing global population. Corruption and cronyism rise to unprecedented levels of wealth. Immigrants, regardless of their actual or potential contribution to the socioeconomic good of all, are singled out as “takers and users,” sappers of the wealth of the masses, a vector which the power elite often embrace as deflecting the ire of the masses that might otherwise be focused on them. Scapegoats are sought in every possible nook and cranny so that blame for hard times can be directed at “something” that allows the sloganeering proselytizers to justify their demand for political power.
The lurch to the right embraces those who believe their proselytizers’ slogans. Government regulation and taxation of the rich has shackled America, extinguished growth, and what growth exists is being sucked dry by those unwanted, job-stealing, tax-dodging, social-service-consuming immigrants (undocumented or otherwise). Sound familiar? Add fundamental religiosity to the mix, deny climate change and even evolution, and you have the Tea Party.
Even in successful and growing nations face these forces… like Turkey which has exploded economically in recent years, has moved definitively back to traditional Islam, internet censorship and away from its secular and democratic roots. Its leadership, fearing challenges from segments of Turkish society who have either been left behind or are disillusioned with the tone and direction of their increasingly autocratic leadership. Turkey’s leadership has moved to crush the opposition (with military and police violence used with accelerating frequency).
With free-floating, stateless threats challenging the developed world, incumbent leaders have found a justification for anti-freedom restrictions and intrusions that probably would have made our founding fathers cringe and scream in rage. Try and explain the NSA surveillance program to Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. And if the swing to the right fails to produce the promised results, the anger of the masses sometimes turns so severely to the left that it creates anarchy, decimates the overreaching incumbents and razes virtually all existing established political structures with a political “do-over.” Picture the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian overthrow of 1917. Wars start, often to distract the masses, but woe to the losers.
How many have died in such do-overs? How many cases of genocide have been fertilized in the attempt to implement the simplistic solutions of political proselytizers of the left? Since repression has worked as often as it has not, incumbent power-interests are as likely to resist with force (and it usually escalates slowly with lots of little things until there is an incident or series of incidents that marks the transition to brutalism) than they are to accommodate the needs of the masses. You can buy time that way. But when the trickle of growing disillusionment rises to an extreme level, the power-incumbents are decimated.
Why don’t we learn the lessons of history, embrace moderation that gives hope to as many as possible and deal with truth and the world as it really is? To many, they want those elusive answers and simplistic solutions now. They’re too scared to let go. And so history simply repeats itself. In short, humanity seems only to learn the lessons of history the hard way… over and over again.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect someone will be writing (?) this same blog hundreds of years from now.
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