I can’t argue with anything you said. I can only argue that under Democrats, authoritarianism and the erosion of civil rights happen slower. We’ll have more time to acclimate ourselves to the concept of a General Strike. There’s no reason to give facism a helping hand by skipping the election.
It’s my impression that Historically the slow bloil tends to breed acceptance, not rebellion, and when it doesn’t there is generally a long period (decades, even centuries) of misery after the slow decay before people finally force a change for the better.
I can see your point, I just don’t agree with your expectation that the slow crumble will be a less painfull way overall to get people to do what it takes to recover than the crash-n-burn - yeah, it’s less painful immediatelly, but the pain lasts longer and the depths reached are probably much worse since human perception of how bad a crisis is, is based on where they were before not on absolute terms, so a crash-n-burn (i.e. a crisis, unlike the slow crumble) needs not collapse things quite as badly as the slow crumble to induce a general feeling that “this is unnacceptable”.
All that said, I’m fortunate I’m not an American or living in America and that the actions of both Trump and Biden (more the former) have made the US be seen as “not all that great” and “a bad example to follow” over here so the contagion factor for whatever happens over there is a lot less than it would have been a decade or two ago.
I can safelly wonder about all that at an intellectual level safe in a country that’s not really going to hurt from the changes taking place in America.
I can see your point, I just don’t agree with your expectation that the slow crumble will be a less painfull way overall to get people to do what it takes to recover than the crash-n-burn - yeah, it’s less painful immediatelly, but the pain lasts longer and the depths reached are probably much worse since human perception of how bad a crisis is, is based on where they were before not on absolute terms, so a crash-n-burn (i.e. a crisis, unlike the slow crumble) needs not collapse things quite as badly as the slow crumble to induce a general feeling that “this is unnacceptable”.
Two points, I think.
The first is that, honestly, if this is the like, assessment we’re making, we’re totally fucked. Not in the sense that we’re totally fucked, but in that we’re totally fucked if we’re making that assessment, ja feel? It shouldn’t really matter too much one way or the other what the outcome is, there, obviously the strategies for real change are the same in either case. We’re also more broadly fucked if we’re having this conversation of like, oh well which one is the damage control, there, because it takes a conversation away from what those strategies for change might be, and puts the perspective more towards like, okay, the supermassive meteor is hitting, do we have an orgy or do we get in the bunker? No conception of how to stop it, just sort of like, a doomer sense of resignation, a doomer smokescreen. Maybe this is like the fabled “accelerationist perspective”, right, but I don’t think so. That’s a political movement, it still does things, and the people who are in it still end up doing things even if they think like, collapse of either the political system or just generalized ecological collapse and the holocene extinction are inevitable. In no case, really, can we come to a conclusion about it that kind of, forgoes the idea that we still end up doing general strikes, protests, and [redacted]. This isn’t really a criticism of you, but of this conversation more broadly, because I’ve seen it happen like a million times every time election season rolls around.
I dunno, I guess I’m just saying that I don’t think this meta-level, abstract conversation is very useful. It’s sort of like when people talk about freedom or efficiency. I’ve been obsessing a little bit, it’s surfaced once again in my mind, how those values are such core values to people’s worldviews, right. They’re core to people’s decision making. And yet, they’re totally meaningless, they’re proxy values that indicate nothing on their own. One man’s freedom to own guns infringes on another’s freedom to live in a gun free society. One definition of efficiency says it’s better to diversify and decentralize the methods of production, to better insulate against external forces which might collapse a system and make it less brittle, collapses which lead to increasingly larger losses as time goes on. The other definition of efficiency says that it’s better to engage in mass production and centralized production, because the margins are better, and you can specialize more. This whole conversation is sort of, it strikes me as similar to when people argue about freedom or efficiency. We’re arguing over an abstraction, here, we’re implicitly accepting a framing in which we’ve already kind of lost.
The second point is that I don’t know if we really have enough data to go with either perspective. The “slower and less painful” decision isn’t always obvious electorally, even though we might make it out to be so in hindsight. It just seems more like either position is a gut feeling, to me. Against the cries of the history nerds, we can’t much use historical precedent for these sorts of decisions. Anyone that’s not a hack imposing a grand narrative on history knows that basically everything in history is just a hurricane that forms because a butterfly beats its wings, it’s all an insane set of chances and probabilities.
So I don’t know if we can come to a conclusion in which is better, and I don’t really know if we even need to in order to still know where we should go and what we should do.
Well, I happen to think that the US is finished with its Greatest Power stage, just like every other nation in History that was once the Greatest Power for a while eventually fell of that pedestal, hence you could say you’re totally fucked in aggregate. However given the massive disparity in wealth distribution over there and how the gains and the costs of Imperial America are distributed - a few people get most of the gains whilst most people get to pay for the costs such as the Military - it’s quite possible that as the US becomes Just Another Big Nation and thus less rich in aggregate, the majority of people are still better off than before because they never really got the benefits of Imperial America whilst having to pay the costs.
Ultimatelly it depends on how much the elites destroy on their way down, which in turn depends on how much people in general fight against or cooperate with their desperate clinging to their elite position in an elite nation.
(By the way, your efficiency point is interesting: you see, one of those ideas of efficiency is long term - specifically the diversification for robustness one - and the other one is short-term. Short term efficiency yield more results moment by moment but does so at the risk of collapse from even relativelly mild external shocks, by which point that system stops operating and has to be rebuilt and if you count those downtimes and the cost of rebuilding, it actually adds up to less in the long run. Long term efficiency as you described it add robustness to shocks hence makes something unlikely to collapse when faced with one, but does so at the cost of less efficiency when things are going fine and there are no shocks. Ultimatelly what is the best efficiency depends of your time-frame: for example a Nation State, which aims to exist ideally forever, should be aiming for long-term efficiency, whilst a speculative investor in the Stock Market naturally only cares about short-term efficiency as they’re in-today-out-tomorrow - the former has an outlook measured in decades or centuries and can’t exactly “leave the market” in times of crisis, whilst the latter has an outlook of days or months and can just cash out and wait during shock periods or, if they can short, bet in the “things will get worse” direction)
As for your second point, I agree that we don’t have enough data and probably never will: the world changes and no two situations are the same so we’ll never be sure.
So anything you chose to do is a risk.
However doing nothing is just as much a risk.
Usually change happens when people’s judgement of those risks (which is generally flawed) is heavilly tilted to seeing “do nothing” as the greatest risk.
