The Current Situation

There is a fundamental disconnect between the current political situation and the larger historic struggle in which it is placed. 9/11 drove a wedge between our political parties, and a two-decade-plus war of attrition only drove that wedge further and further into our politics, until it was no longer about competing ideas but rather an ongoing undeclared information war between parties. The competition is not a race to see who has the more effective public policy; it is instead uncontrolled combat between individuals who have become divorced from any actual political knowledge or ability. In our current state of affairs, the people who win elections are reliably good at one thing: winning elections. That has become the entire game, as members of both parties dodge their fiduciary responsibilities, avoid their constituents, and negotiate vast sums of resources through an openly corrupted lobbying system that allows unfettered political access to the wealthiest and most well-connected on the planet.

Not even the nation! Because “speech” has been turned into money through Citizens United, this has opened up a global marketplace of political influence! Everyone’s special interests are allowed in the discussion, even if the impacts of those lobbying efforts fall exclusively on the citizens (who are in no way united). Unlimited, undisclosed political donations could only exist for so long in any system before rampant, naked, uncontainable corruption would logically follow. I’m honestly surprised every day by how far we’ve made it with this pretend democratic republic limping along without collapsing entirely into an authoritarian oligopoly. At this point, the oligopoly largely has the good sense to hide from public view, outside of some notable exceptions such as Elon Musk. Musk is an oligarch who doesn’t hide his corruption as much as wraps it in good intentions. It’s OK to buy elections, everyone, because we’re going to Mars! (?)

It can be hard to understand the current situation and then look to the future with any sense of optimism. Gone are the days of noble leaders with clear intentions. Gone is the time when speaking out against atrocity and corruption would lead to reform. Forgotten is the sacrifice that so many have made to avoid this corporately sponsored fascism. We are left with nothing to do but speak out or remain silent and, regardless of any complaints, accept that representative democracy has ultimately failed. It was largely the case, since its inception, that the rich were the primary beneficiaries of the Constitution, and this is the unfortunate end result. We made some real efforts with women’s suffrage, providing citizenship to Indigenous people, and the civil rights movement, but in the end, the power of the wealthy proved too strong. Their resources created a volume of “speech” that 300 million voices couldn’t shout over. This is the current situation, but it will not last forever.

Nothing does. The great lie of a failing society is not merely that its failures are necessary, but that they are inevitable; that money must always mean value, that wealth must always mean power, that nations and markets and institutions must exist tomorrow exactly as they exist today because we have forgotten that every one of them began as an idea. Currency is an idea. Property is an idea. Government is an idea. America itself is an idea, maintained every morning by hundreds of millions of people collectively agreeing that it continues to exist. Ideas are not permanent. Societies are not permanent. Nations are not permanent. We make these things real through shared belief, but misplaced belief is not truth, and the accumulated assumptions of generations are not the laws of physics. We must emancipate ourselves from the failed notions that brought us here. We must unshackle value from currency, liberate our imagination from the narrow catalogue of what is “realistic,” and free our minds from the supposed inevitability of circumstances constructed entirely by a few broken human beings. 

There are more of us than there are of them. There always have been. Every institution drawing breath from our labor, our attention, our money, our obedience, and our faith survives because enough of us continue accepting it. If enough people cease believing that misery is the natural price of civilization, if enough people demand something better and are willing to undertake the extraordinary work required to build it, then what appeared permanent will become astonishingly temporary. The future is not waiting somewhere ahead of us, fully assembled. We are building it now.

The alternative is not permanence; it is collapse. Infinite greed has been married to a finite planet, and sooner or later that relationship dies. When there are no new markets left to conquer, no untouched resources left to seize, no additional wages to suppress, homes to financialize, necessities to monetize, or public institutions to hollow out and sell back to us, the machinery will begin consuming itself. The oligopoly will turn inward. Corporations will devour competitors, conglomerates will swallow corporations, financiers will carve apart conglomerates, and fortunes will collide with fortunes over an ever-smaller pile of increasingly expensive things. Prices will climb beyond consumers, consumers will disappear beneath debt, markets will contract, and the predators who exhausted the herd will eventually discover one another standing alone on an empty plain. 

We will have given them everything on the way there: the last penny from the account, the last mortgage against the house, the last manageable payment converted into impossible debt, the last measure of health and labor and blood, until we are living in a ditch beside the magnificent machine we spent our lives building, digging through its garbage for something edible. Then, at last, there will be nothing left to consume.

It would be better to change than collapse. Infinitely better. But change of that magnitude will require vision large enough to imagine what does not yet exist, dedication strong enough to survive ridicule and failure while bringing it into the world, and unyielding effort sustained long after misplaced outrage has exhausted itself. History does not guarantee us a better world, but it should remind us that this one is temporary. Our futures rest in the hands of those who can accept this impermanence and lead us towards lasting, positive change.