Things Fall Apart

This has not been a very good year all around. I mean, it’s been great for me, personally… better job, better pay, closer friends, et cetera. But it has been a disaster for the world. Climate change continues unchecked, the civil war in Syria is unabated, the flow of refugees out of Syria has triggered a rise in far-right nationalism throughout Europe, the great experiment of the EU is threatened with dissolution.

All these can be traced relatively simply from one to the next. It’s more difficult to make predictions, of course, but there’s a straightforward cause and effect progression.

It’s more difficult to unravel just what happened in the United States this week, and impossible to make reliable predictions for the future there. The election of a far-right demagogue with no political record leaves us relying only on his campaign promises for information. Said promises were made in a vacuum, without knowing how any of them could be accomplished, without knowing or caring what the powers of the presidency are, without knowing any facts of the present situation, and certainly without knowing that the potential consequences of them could be.

Well then, the deed is done. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. Americans awakened Wednesday morning to a great uncertainty. It might be a disaster, like the Brexit vote in the UK. It might be a catastrophe, like the election of the Golden Dawn in Greece. It might be an apocalypse, like the elections of fascists in the 1930s.

Frankly it could be worse than that… Mussolini never had nuclear weapons, killer robots, or anything approaching the modern surveillance apparatus.

And of course, it would be remiss not to say that it could be more of the same. Trump has promised bombing campaigns, mass deportations, oil pipelines, stripping health funding, violently crushing protests, and turning back refugees. These are of course all things the US has engaged in for decades. Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

That’s the best case scenario. It’s a best case scenario that will result in millions of deaths around the world, hundreds of thousands in the US. It’s reset the most optimistic global warming predictions from 2° to 3°.

I now have no idea whether we will get the best case world on fire or the worst case nuclear winter. You don’t know either. The Washington press corps has no idea, the Speaker of the House has no idea, the Vice President has no idea.

Ultimately I suspect the Trump has no idea either. The man doesn’t seem to be real big on forethought and advance planning. There are conspiracy theories that his whole public persona was a cynical invention to get elected, but he has changed little over the past two years, even over the past decades. If Trump presses the button it will be at the spur of the moment.

If we don’t know what Trump will do we have still less knowledge of what people might do to stop him. I’ll try to cover that in a future post.