“Yes, sometimes we need to take a moment, shed a tear, and then double down on our commitment to building a cleaner, fairer world for all. The recent #USElection results may have left many of us rattled, though perhaps not surprised.“
~ Mamta Borgoyary, Executive Director, She Changes Climate
I have tried to maintain a stance of Hopeful Realism as we move inexorably deeper into the Anthropocene. “It ain’t easy,” as the damage to our only home, the Earth System, accelerated through the first two decades of the twenty-first century and continues unabated almost half way into the third. It has been a long hard disappointing slog. The latest UN Environment Programme report, Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please! shows that NO PROGRESS on reducing carbon emissions has been made since the so-called “Paris Accords” of 2015, almost a decade ago. The first four years of Trumpery only made it that much worse. I shudder to think of what four more years of political and economic chaos, more skillfully applied, will do to impede planetary progress in the name of capital accumulation and plain old greed.
The steady growth of authoritarian tendencies and the emergence of neo-fascist movements across industrialized nations of the Global North continues, only to peak with yesterday’s elections in the U.S.A.
However, this will probably not be the peak of autocracy in the U.S., as Trump vows various forms of persecution, retribution, expulsion, and domination. If you value your personal freedom and/or democracy, read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and his new book, On Freedom. Nobody explains it more clearly than he does on his Substack platform, Thinking About…. Even though I understand, to the extent that is possible, the processes of cult formation, it still amazes me that a lifelong grifter, a narcissistic sociopath, could so effectively con half the nation’s voters.
It seems that as stability declines, growing fear and resentment misapplied to “the usual suspects”—vulnerable scapegoats such as immigrants, Black folks, and all peoples of color—breeds more and more hate, spite, and the illusion that autocratic power will somehow ‘fix’ it all. All of that is happening in the context of a rising white nationalism and in the continuing denial of the real existential threats the global corporate political economy has forced upon the world, the people, and diverse species of life.
Hope, Illusion, and Autocracy
It has been building for decades, just as it did in Europe in the early mid-twentieth century. As science progressed, so did techno-industrial corporate political hubris. As environmental and economic ‘problems’ intensified, so did the illusion that every crisis could be resolved by the simple cause-effect application of more and more complex technology by the public-private institutional matrix. The consequences of linear single target interventions—such as tariffs and geoengineering—are demonstrably unpredictable. The cult of techno-industrial centralized empowerment surged right past all indicators of impending disaster. Simplistic linear thinking failed to account for the complex non-linear processes inherent in all living systems, including human societies and ecosystems.
The inevitable result of the corporate/government misapplication of ‘advanced’ technology in the context of an increasingly hierarchic political-economic form of social control, was growing social unrest, misguided by autocratic demagoguery. The forces of authoritarianism overcame the impulse for, and institutions of, democracy. Don’t even get me started on AI.
Corporate autocratic control of increasingly centralized mass media (Fox News, NewsMax, et al) and social media (fascist Musk’s blatant propaganda machine ‘X’, exploiter Zuckerberg’s FB-ideological silo builder, China-funded youth-distractor TikTok, et al) all result in the ‘normalization’ of a budding hierarchy of tyranny. Meanwhile the traditional-media networks offer empty platitudes and peripheral facts.
Reality and Hope
We live in far too interesting times. The whole notion of how the triumph of Trumpery will play out is fascinating but fraught with justifiable “fear and loathing,” to cite Hunter Thompson’s prescient expression. Insecurity and fear immediately surge for half the nation as fervor for an apparitional ‘victory’ of a delusional ideology engulfs the other half of voters who ‘won.’ Tesla stock shot up over thirteen percent overnight.
In a strange way, although I had not thought of it before, my new book, Holding IT Together: Social Control in an Age of Great Transformation, may have implicitly predicted the current situation, although it clearly argues for the necessity of a very different path. It certainly contemplated with trepidation the possibility of the U.S. falling deep into autocracy, while holding out hope for progress and compassion. In the struggles to avoid any outcome that would impede the necessary transformation of society to achieve an ecological civilization, I have been reminded many times of Greta Thunberg’s affirmation, “Hope is an action.” Resistance to autocracy is possible, difficult, and necessary. Confrontation is not the answer, since, as John Lennon put it shortly before he was assassinated by a crazy anti-fan, “They have all the guns, they have all the money.” (Paraphrase.) We must simply move forward with all viable actions to achieve a stable planet by building on the justice, compassion, and survival actions that will allow human flourishing.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 