Old America

History is a tough read. Even at its best, maybe especially at its best, it's dry, it's boring, its complicated, there are so many details to remember that it often seems like one fucking thing after the other. If you're inspired by a history book, if it made sense of the world, if it gave names to the forces that made you suffer, if it 'changed your life', it's 99% likely a bad book.

If you're looking to history to know what happens next, it's not through reading history that you'll know. Whether you know the details, you know the basic outline: progress followed by regress, reforms so long delayed they provoke revolutions, true believers inevitably proven wrong, revolutionary idealists causing reactionary movements and mass death, the remains of the world inevitably conquered by realists who understand human folly, most of whom, being realists, are indifferent to suffering.

You may not know history well, but all of us know human beings. If you think human beings are, on the whole, good, think about all the people you meet who are exceptions to that rule, sociopaths and psychopaths, narcissists, pathological abusers, and run of the mill assholes. Now make a composite average human being from the humans you love and esteem, and the human beings you have contempt or hatred for. Factor in all your love and hatred, hope and fear, experience of triumph vs. experience of defeat. That's the average human being, who means well when it's convenient, always frames the circumstances of any story to flatter themselves, and who vacillates every day from being decent person to kind of an asshole. Now, try to inspire this person to change society. Do you really think the average human being will understand the world correctly or implement change correctly?

And if they're neither good at understanding nor change, what happens when you try to make them change? Some will properly change, and some will resist change to their dying breath, most will fuck it up out of laziness. Change, for good or ill, is the biggest ordeal on the planet. The average person's understanding of the larger world is limited at the best of times, how much more limited is their understanding when you throw in the anxiety of not knowing their futures? If you force millions of people to change their ways, they will be more disposed to make bad decisions, not less.

We in America have been promised progress every decade since JFK's New Frontier, and we never got much of it. Why is that? I've read enough history to say definitively that I don't know, but I do know thousands of human beings, and from knowing them, I'm sure that the reason is that people are risk-averse, and they're risk-averse because most risks don't pay off. Every time progress is made on one front, it's lost on another.

The last couple of months have been a balm for the soul. Widespread vaccination, economic relief, initiatives on clean energy, banning guns, mass employment, repairing infrastructure, and NO TRUMP MEGAPHONE! It's fucking manna from heaven.

But has the temperature gone really and truly down? Whether by police or an insane clown posse, there is a headline murder in the streets every day, and the results broadcast 24 hours a day. Gun murder is as simple a fact of American life as any warzone, and even if most Americans are unlikely to have gun violence affect them, the threat of it is literally everywhere, and the stress makes people do unwise things from going out into the streets unmasked to going out into the streets in protest to further tempt killers. The more risky life is, the more people get accustomed to risk and charge like bulls into risks they can easily avoid. Human beings avoid risks because risks risk failure and punishment.

But just as most human beings I know are at baseline risk averse, so history seems to show that humans around the world are the same way. When any gain in privilege is truly gotten, the result is almost inevitably a few days of celebration, then years of post-traumatic stress. Humiliation sets in that you've struggled so much and for so long, only for the triumph to procure you so little. When Communism fell in the Soviet Union, which killed 20-60 million people, was the Russian response widespread rejoicing at the fall of a regime that butchered their families? Not at all, many Russians refer to the 90s as a 'Time of Troubles', which is what they used to call the early 1600s when one third of Russians died of famine. Within ten years, they'd lurched themselves back into the hands of another autocrat whom they practically begged to seize dictatorial powers. When the African-American community finally got some Civil Rights, was gratitude the widespread response? Of course not, it was four years of widespread rioting that gutted cities and all the opportunities which newly gotten civil rights should have earned them. When France and Russia and Iran finally got their absolute monarchs to procure liberal reforms, was the end result reform? Of course not, the result was too little too late, the establishment refused to enact the proposed changes, and the public rebelled with deadly revolutions that caused the deaths of millions.

And of course, in all these cases, these are incredibly unfair generalizations to millions of people. I deliberately left out American insistence on Russia hard landing into capitalism, and white Americans' red-lining African-Americans, and French and Russian and Iranian liberals who worked day and night for their countrymen to avoid a revolution they knew would end in decades of dictatorship, but that's exactly the point. The average human is kind of an asshole, and there are billions who are worse than average. When change is procured, all sorts of selfish people will make arrangements for the changes to benefit them rather than benefit the people who need it most.

Will the results of these solutions truly cause a lower temperature, or will they release latent stressors in the American psyche? This country has been under fundamentally conservative rule for my entire lifetime plus fifteen years. All it took was Obama, who was just one or two notches left of properly administered liberalism, and it was enough air to leak in after two generations of of conservative repression that Obama's wave of progress already unleashed entirely new set of far-left-of-progressive ideas about the intersection of politics and identity which may have revolutionized the world as completely as Marx revolutionized the world with class, and Luther revolutionized with faith.

We think of Trump as the main event of the last few years, but neither Trump nor any other authoritarian reactionary movement is the main event. The right-wing does not believe in progress, reactionaries only react, they cannot produce. Ta-Nehisi Coates called Trump the 'first white President', and that is exactly right. Trump is as much the product of identity politics as Bell Hooks and Ibram X. Kendi, just as Mussolini was as much the result of Marxism as Lenin, Cesare Borgia as much the product of Hussite reformation as Martin Luther. That is not to say that writers like Kimberle Crenshaw or Judith Butler are Lenin or Martin Luther, obviously they're quite far from it, but a path toward some kind of revolutionary movement is most clearly being paved as we speak.

There is no such thing as Late Capitalism, capitalism is self-generating - the true permanent revolution from the bottom up; but there is most definitely such a thing as Late Civilization. When civilizations are no longer blank slates, when the rules and expectations, customs, perhaps even regulations, of a society are set in stone, so too are dynamism and movement. When a country's citizens are too weighed down with history and tradition, no reform can happen, and revolutionary movements come along whose further left drift is exponentially self-generating as they realize how impossible reform is without blowing the whole damn thing up.

This is not the 1930s or 60s thank god. We did make progress, but the progress of American society was procured at the destruction of Old Europe. Once the old order was destroyed, we were free to remake the world as a less despotic place. It's much easier to remake the world, both at home and abroad, when 200 million people have already died for it. But we, for the first time in US history, are now 'Old America,' and there may now be no chance for reform without blowing the whole thing up and starting from scratch.

We'll obviously see soon enough if I'm right or if I'm just talking out my ass (yet again...), but if I know anything at all about history (and I probably don't...), all the current chaotic din of internet voices from under-heard demographics will eventually coalesce around a single revolutionary figure, who will be as bellicose and authoritarian as the their movement began peaceable and conflict-resolving.

....I hope I'm wrong, and right or wrong I'd advise keep plowing ahead on reform rather than revolution, but if history is any guide, nobody gives a fuck what I think...