Here’s a little question. Does America have two years left?

Nope. I’m not trying to provoke, insult, goad, or taunt you. I’d rather be making disco than writing about American collapse. Yet deep down, I’d bet that you’ve asked yourself the same question — more than once, maybe more than once a day, these days — and then told yourself you’re crazy for asking.

You’re not crazy. In fact, you’d be crazy if you weren’t asking yourself this question at this juncture in history. Your intuition is exactly right — it’s the you’ve been told to think about what will happen and won’t that’s wrong.(And of course I don’t mean “two years left” as in the Rapture. America will still be a place. I mean it as in: “will America still be a nominally functioning democracy, a modern society, a member of the league of civilized nations — or will it be something like a collapsed, globally reviled pariah state?”)

Let’s start three years ago. Back then, many of us — people who’ve studied authoritarian collapses, lived through them, or both — began warning, pretty strenuously, of…everything that’s happening now, coming faster, harder, and worse than everyone who hadn’t studied or lived through it expected. We weren’t taken very seriously — we were dismissed as alarmists and provocateurs, despite many of us being respected authors and thinkers and intellectuals and so on. Why weren’t we taken seriously? How is it that mainstream thought is shocked and baffled every single day by what goes on — but hasn’t learned why it continues to be, why it is unable to predict what will happen next?

Because the logic — or illogic — of American thought, which was based on decades of badly mistaken theories of politics, economics, psychology, and sociology, went like this. “He’ll never get elected!” “Even if he does, what can he do! He’s a joke!” “Forget it! Our institutions are way stronger than a goon like that!” “We’re the greatest society in history, are you kidding?” “You’re being hyperbolic! You’re so dumb! You’re overstating it!” — and so on. In other words, the idea itself that all of this could happen was dismissed from the beginning — it was ruled out of the set of possibilities, without a moment’s thought, consideration, or reflection. It can’t happen here. And that was a fatal mistake.

Because what we were trying to warn of (or at least I was) wasn’t just about a single person — but a set of social trends, historical tides, that were setting off a classical sequence of collapse, seen many times before. Economic stagnation. A middle class imploding. Skyrocketing inequality. A society without safety nets, public goods. People living at the edge, feeling insecure, unsafe, threatened. A culture of cruelty. Long-standing tribalism and bigotry. A predatory economy. An extremist, ironically Soviet rejection of modernity, by politicians, thinkers, pundits — the idea that America could build a modern, post industrial society on the industrial age ideas of self-reliance, individualism, consumption, and no investment whatsoever by society in people. All this is what happened in the 1930s — and it was very, very clear, three years ago, even ten years ago, that America was poised at the knife edge of the classical sequence of social collapse.

So here we are, two years after the election of a demagogue — who wasn’t recognized as one at the time, by media, by journalists, by columnists, thinkers, by intellectuals. They went out of their way, remember, to focus on Hillary’s emails — how absurd that seems now. Yet the lesson is that they failed to protect society, to safeguard the public interest, in a way I don’t think the world has seen since World War II. I don’t say that as a denunciation — j’accuse! — but only so that we continue answering our question — does America have two years left?

What’s happened in the last two years? Did they turn out better or worse than American thought predicted? Not just worse — but catastrophically worse. What’s happened is everything that people like me foretold — that classical sequence of collapse — which is exactly everything that every single noted thinker, journalist, politicians, or leader at the time in America said, over and over again, couldn’t and wouldn’t happen. But they continue to do the very same thing today, don’t they? Mueller will step in. He’ll get thrown out. He’ll have to resign!

They haven’t learned the most fundamental lesson yet. They overestimated the health of their society and democracy and checks and balances, badly. And they undersestimated the strength and power and quickness of authoritarianism — fatally. That is because they never understood — never having lived through it, studied it, knowing it — that when authoritarianism begins to rise, the worst case is not one the least probable one, but becomes, every day, the most probable one. Think of a bell-shaped distribution collapsing into a bipolar one — that’s what happens during social collapses, too, in many ways: wealth, like democracy, social attitudes, trust, power, or information, divides into two extremes — that is the sequence of collapse at work.

Two years. First, there was a “travel ban”. Then we found out the election was hacked. Then an entire province was left to simply collapse after a hurricane. Then immigrants were called animals. Then papers started being checked. Then allies and friends were insulted, harangued, and discarded, while dictators were flattered. Then kids and parents were separated. Now there are camps. Now supremacists are filling top positions in the State. The equivalent of a Gestapo and a Stasi is rising — what else do you call people that rip breast-feeding babies away from mothers? Democracy is in tatters, the rule of law is ruins, a civilized society is imploding, and the world looks on. The classical sequence of collapse, remember?

Do you remember that when Trump was elected, people would joke about camps being built? About being deported? It’s not so funny now, is it? What’s happened in the last two years is the unthinkable. The unimaginable. The impossible. But — and it’s a big but — only to those who weren’t thinking very well in the first place. The worst case is the most probable one, remember? But American thought had ruled out the worst case — yet the problem is that the worst case is exactly what you must consider very, very seriously, and treat as likely, when self-reinforcing cycles like authoritarianism confront you.

It took America two years — just two years — to get to camps being built. To textbook crimes against humanity — here’s the UN’s definition, if you think I overstate it, “mass deportation”, “forcible transfer”, “ethnic persecution” — being committed. To kids being ripped away from parents. To the rest of the civilized world seeing America as a threat, a destabilizing influence, a problem — not a friend and ally anymore.

So here’s my question. If it took us two years to get here — where will the next two years take us? We’re already way, way beyond what we thought was possible, aren’t we? What happens, in the classical sequence of authoritarian collapse, after these things? What does history teach us are the next steps after camps are built and papers are checked?

I think you know the answer. I don’t think that I have to spell it out for you. Let me just say this. The next two years after the last two years are what happens after the unthinkable has already taken place.

It was foolish to believe all the above: he won’t get elected, it won’t matter if he does, he can’t do anything — because to believe that was also to believe that America was above the laws of history, the sequence of collapse universal to nations. Yet the very same thing is still just as true. Unbridled optimism — that most foolish and noble of American qualities — is not a quality that serves us in these times. In times like these, when the whirlwind is falling, when the vicious cycle has kicked off — the worst case becomes the most probable one, every single day that it goes on. Hence, it is the one that we must take the most seriously of all at the very beginning — only then can we prevent it, again, day by day. But if we dismiss it, then it will overwhelm us with its speed, quickness, and fury. We will always be shocked, baffled, bewildered, and surprised. And that is the story of the last two years, isn’t it? Yet is the story of today, still.

So let me ask you again: does America have two years left?

Umair

June 2018