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I look at the world these days and I shudder. I wonder why more don’t. The lights are going out, one by one. The lights of democracy, progress, and civilization.

“Going out,” though, is a poor choice of phrase. It’s inaccurate. It hides more than it reveals. The lights are being extinguished by those who prefer the darkness. Untended, neglected, spent, even by those who should have cherished the light, they are turning dark. The winds, too roar, and the embers die. A dark age falls.

In India, after a recent visit by a certain American President, what are politely called “riots” erupted. They are better called religious pogroms. Hindus turned on Muslims, in great waves of violence. But not just any kind of violence — old religious hatreds. What do I care about them, you ask? So what? Ah, my friend.

Let us examine, using that example, and your probable reaction to it, the forces causing the lights to go out.

The first is the active force — the hard right surging around the globe. Now, there’s a place for conservatism in every polity. But this isn’t conservatism, really. 21st century conservatism is easy enough to see — what it should be, at least: conserving the environment, nature, animal life, virtue, and so forth. Do you see any of that at work in the wave of political upheaval that’s swept the globe?

This resurgent wave which is politely often called something like “populism” or “the hard right” is in fact something as old as it is nightmarish. It isn’t interested in democracy — in it’s fundamental tenets and beliefs: equality, freedom, justice … for all. Whether in America, India, Russia, or China, those old values are things to laugh at and mock and demean.

But what do we call coalitions of people who aren’t interested in democracy, in the most fundamental and elemental ways? It’s true that they can use democracy to undo it, but that doesn’t make them democratic, any more than shooting a gun at yourself makes you safer. Such coalitions have precise and obvious names: authoritarian, fascist, and so forth.

Do I exaggerate? Let's think about it.

To be against basic values like equality, freedom, and justice. That is where a very large part of the world is now. Again, that’s inaccurate: where it’s regressed to. India is the great nation of Nehru and Gandhi. They are two of the great minds and leaders of the 20th century. And yet here it is — aflame with hatred, boiling with bloodlust. Do you see what I mean by regress? India’s authoritarians are dashing the hopes of millennia, to become the world’s largest democracy, on the rocks of hate — and couldn’t care less. Cross half a world to America. America’s ascendant hard right is just the same: it genuinely scorns democracy to the extent that it has shredded every branch of government there is, violated norms, transgressed laws, been impeached … and doesn’t care.

This force, the active force, the hard right snuffing out the lights of democracy, civilization, and progress, is very, very successful. Far too successful, in fact. How is it possible that in just a decade or so the world has found itself in such a dire, parlous, threadbare state? Because this coalition met essentially no resistance.

Take America as an example. What were the Democrats doing while the authoritarians were building … literal concentration camps? They funded them. What did they do when the authoritarians were running for office? They refused to acknowledge, admit, or even be the slightest bit concerned by the dangers. What did they impeach a President for? Bribes, not … crimes against humanity. LOL — a bitter LOL. With an “opposition” like that — what do you expect, but the bad guys to run amok?

At the same time, the center left in America refused to fight … for any real semblance of democracy, civilization, or progress. Do you think that Americans should have decent, public, affordable healthcare, retirement, education … among other things? LOL, the establishment laughed — of course not. So they cooked up half-baked, addle-brained, jerry-rigged compromises, like Obamacare. Which were, objectively speaking, colossal failures. Life expectancy fell, profits skyrocketed. You know the score. There’s not a single dimension or way that I can think of in which the American center left kept the lights of civilization and progress on. Or at least tended, nourished, fed. So of course it was easy for the bad guys to snuff them out.

But if you think I’m just here to criticize political elites, I’ve got bad news for you. What about the left’s intellectual elites, its darlings? Well, over the last decade or so they became obsessed with things like gender pronouns and intersectionality. The politics of 18 year old students took over. By now, I’m told that a gender pronoun hurts more than a genocide. What the? Are these people serious? What planet are they on?

You see, keeping the lights on isn’t about being a childish narcissist. Keeping the light in your particular dorm room on — which is what gender pronouns and labels and identities over this and that amount to. It’s about keeping the lights on. For everyone. It means supporting — demanding — things like an end to global hunger, violence, poverty, war, illness, inequality, and so on. But today’s left doesn’t care about any of those things. Is Captain America going to be genderfluid?! Tell me more!! Mommy! I want my special name and my comic book superhero. Child, you’ve crept under the covers with a flashlight, because you’re afraid of the monsters. Who will keep the lights on?

In this cultural milieu — one where the left became hostile, aggressive, spiteful, and absolutist over what to call who’s in what’s pants and how — what did anyone expect but the bad guys to win? I can’t remember the last time I read a so-called leftist arguing that the world should have less hunger, thirst, poverty, war, violence, and so on. But I can read a hundred every day about this and that gender pronoun label comic book superhero. Of course the bad guys went on a rampage. Cultural resistance dropped to zero — against historic and great evils like authoritarianism and fascism. Who do you hear even speaking those words — but me, maybe?

All that was left of the left was bizarre, fringe culture wars, over issues of identity, which, quite frankly, couldn’t matter less to about 99.9% of humanity. The good people, in other words, turned out to be not so good. Or at least not good enough. They were seduced by sex and tribalism and violence, prettied up by an alt-left. They were taught to attack celebrities for “misgendering” — but not care much about, say, actual neo-fascist pogroms. With priorities like that, the bad guys laughed, and began to do their worst.

Comic book superheroes don’t fight real world bad guys. And yet there the left is — furiously fighting over Captain America — while the real America goes down in flames. It’s hard not to laugh at the fatuous absurdity of it all.

That brings me to my third force that’s making the world go dark. What produced all this, anways? What made the world nosedive into regress, at the hands of a wave of neo-fascists and authoritarians? What made the average well-meaning self-described good and reasonable person go into furious denial over it all, and instead focus on comic book superheros and gender pronouns and identity politics?

The great force behind all this — the prime mover — is global economic stagnation. Average incomes are flattening out across the world now. Think of a wave. America’s at the crest. There, incomes have stagnated for half a century. The rest of the world’s following behind. European incomes have stagnated for about two decades. India and China? There, the much-vaunted middle classes are seeing a declining share of the economy, every single year.

Life isn’t getting better. Unless by “better”, we mean the things of capitalism: a big TV, smartphone, a Facebook account, fake friends, and so on. But these things don’t make you happy. They don’t give your life meaning. More to the point, you can’t feed your family with them. They only produce loneliness, despair, unhappiness, envy, resentment, and rage. If you doubt me, take a hard look at America.

What do people really need to live better lives? Money. Public goods — healthcare, education, retirement. Social bonds. Mobility. Leisure. Meaning. Purpose. Belonging. The problem is that all these things are in shorter and shorter supply. The dominant system of the world — American capitalism — denies them, in the name of “growth.” So while you might get that smartphone, big TV, and Facebook account, what you won’t get is the things you need to genuinely live a happier life. In fact, you’ll get less and less of those things. Again, just look at America. The world’s biggest houses, TVs, cars. The world’s angriest, cruellest, most brutal people. Who else makes their kids do “active shooter drills”? Not even Iraqis, so far as I know.

Depressions produce fascist-authoritarian waves. That is the single greatest lesson of 20th century social thought. Keynes, it’s discoverer, solved the problem of human violence. On his shoulders, a left that mattered dreamed of things so beautiful and vast that any previous age in history would have laughed: an end to war, an end to violence, an end to poverty, an end to hunger.

But we built a world like that. At least for a time. Or at least we tried to. Were we ever fully successful? Of course not. But we made great, great strides. Huge leaps. What are just some of the things global cooperation — and investment — did?

They ended diseases which had plagued humanity since time immemorial — smallpox, polio. They massively reduced global poverty. They gave billions shelter, sanitation, food, housing, incomes. They created democracy after democracy. Never before in human history had such an explosion of human potential happened as in the latter half of the 20th century.

And then it all began to turn to dust. As America exported a model of capitalism — neoliberalism — that said nobody should invest in anyone, right down to the point of American not investing in each others’ healthcare. What reason was there then to have a world of cooperation and investment? There wasn’t one.

Pretty soon, the world became a race to the bottom. Who could exploit whom the hardest? The hedge fund manager exploited the banker who exploited the CEO who exploited the manager who exploited the worker. The world became one giant capitalist machine. China sold America cheap good, India sold it cheap services. The whole point of this new global economy was exploitation — the largest profit, by any means possible.

Americans were told to love it. The Chinese and the Indians were told to love it, too — wasn’t this the best thing they’d ever had? But exploitation is exploitation. It’s no coincidence these three nations are at the leading edge of the world’s neo-fascist wave: they’re the ones most inextricably bound up in a web of global capitalist exploitation. But that exploitation produced populaces simmering with resentment, rage, envy, fury. The left-behinds and the rural and the nobodies. The exploited. And the exploiters, too — the manager in his glittering office at Fakebook or Scroogle. They became the sneering Trumpists and the Modi-ites and so on. They had internalized capitalism’s great and terrible law: the strong survive, the weak perish, and that is what is right and fair and just.

That brings me back to now. The lights are going. America once thought of itself as the world’s great leader of freedom and progress. Today — take a look at an idiot, lunatic President — that’s laughable. India once hoped to be the world’s largest democracy. Today, that aspiration’s laughable. There’s China, run by a Communist Party that’s really a minor-league outpost of Capitalism, Inc — and paid the price by never developing democratically at all. There’s Europe, baffled, bewildered, not understanding why buying into American capitalism is wrecking it just the same way as the three cracked pillars of American capitalism, the hard right gaining power by leaps and bounds, the average person turning a little more cruel, a little more vicious, day by day. There’s Russia, circling like a vulture, cackling, ready to pick over the bones.

Need I go on?

The lights are going out, my friends. The hard right wanted them to go out. The left stopped caring. The center turned to Fakebook and reality TV to numb the pain of it all away. I don’t think any of us are blameless. I think we all have a lot of reflection to do, these days, watching the world go dark.

Because that is exactly what is happening today. The lights are going out. There are just a few left now. Canada, Europe here and there, New Zealand. That is not much light left for a whole world. And if they go dark, too — at least if enough of them do — then we will be the people we once were. Scurrying from monsters in the darkness, lashing out at each other in pain, looking for a place to hide, wondering why the sun forgot to rise again today.

Just a thought.

Until next time. ✌🏼