This is not normal. I want to make that perfectly clear.
Okay, maybe it’s normal, if we’ve somehow time warped back to 1930, when the world was last gripped by a nationalist, protectionist fervor that over the course of the subsequent decade devolved into fascist imperialism. But this is 2025. We’re supposed to be better than this.
I hold out hope that there is yet to be some good that comes of it all. That perhaps this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, that this travesty will in some way prompt a collective leap from the Red/Blue quagmire into something better, if not Green then at least an orderly retreat to Purple (see Spiral Dynamics). However, I think it clear that Fukuyama’s thesis has been wholly disproven. The end of history is not denoted by liberal representative democracy, unless history is a digital track set to repeat.
Still, it must be accepted that there are nuggets of truth in the vile rhetoric currently being spewed about. Fundamentally, DEI is predicated on the assumption that there are races. Do I think getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion will end racism? Of course not. But one must admit that DEI draws lines between people, positioning one group against another, creating the very in-group/out-group dynamic that defines fascism.
There are other examples, but I find specifics often obscure the broader point, which is that history, for lack of a better term, is currently demanding we evolve. Failing to do so risks revolution, a return to the beginning, or what George Miller brands The Wasteland. This continual recapitulation, I feel, reveals a flaw in Marx and Engels’ interpretation of historical materialism, for it fails to incorporate the Hindu concept of Samsara. Should we prove incapable of transcending this current mode and achieving Moksha, then revolution will revert us to some previous place on the spectrum of productive modes between tribal anarchy and feudalism, based upon the karma of our past. Evidence of prior such revolution litters the archeological record, from Babylon to the fall of the Soviet Union, a veritable cornucopia of societal death and rebirth spanning generations.
The question, it seems, is will we have the courage. It certainly doesn’t appear so, given that fear is the force defining our current trajectory. Facing the unknown has always been a challenge, made only that much greater by the loss of a supernatural being to instill us with confidence when dealing with existential threats. Already have I heard accounts of otherwise progressive people toeing the despotic line to keep from losing their job or avoid being deported, neither of which are likely to happen or would, by logical deduction, be a blessing if they did. Marx, among others, demonstrated that reproduction is humanity’s penultimate motivation. Only faith in something greater than oneself enables a human being to resist that overarching imperative.
Not that such faith necessarily needs imply a godhead. Throughout time, other abstracts – family, tribe, honor, duty – have all served equally well. But there has to be something. The atomized nihilism of the post-modern era offers no underlying universal principle on which to found social cohesion. Sans some greater unifying foci, the tendency is to embrace those relations that best ensure reproductive success. This is what accounts for the polarization and tribalism seen so widely today. Although we live in a globalized world, there is no common locus.
Inevitably, it returns to class warfare. Those in power were placed there to secure the lifestyle to which we in the United States have grown accustomed and which a broad majority of us perceive as increasingly under threat. Mix in a scooch of Manifest Destiny, a dash of Calvinist superiority, and more than a little fear of a black planet, and you have every US administration since the late Jimmy Carter. It’s only that this one wears its heart on its sleeve.