Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?

photo by Noah Berger for AP (federal troops called in to ‘restore order’ in Portland during the BLM protests)

As ecological and economic collapse accelerate, the follow-on impacts on the other systems of our civilization (political, educational, health care, transportation, communication, social etc) are now starting to be felt. Political system collapse includes the systems of law and order (including the judicial system, enforcement and equality under the law), public institutions and regulators and their infrastructure, and ultimately governments themselves.

I’ve written before about how political collapse is now occurring in various ways around the globe, and suggested that some of the signs of collapse include increasing mis- and disinformation, propaganda and censorship, scapegoating, disenfranchisement, suppression of dissent, widespread surveillance, overt and large-scale corruption, the emergence and use of paramilitaries, widespread arrests, incarcerations and ‘disappearances’, election interference and fraud, and finally election cancellations and the dismantling of democratic institutions. Over the past decade, most of these have been employed in many countries, and their use is becoming widely normalized in much of the world.

Although political situations vary from country to country, a similar dichotomy of behaviours has emerged in recent years in most western nations, often labeled as ‘polarization’. Most of the population has been conditioned and propagandized to support either the Tweedledums (mischaracterized as ‘right-wing conservatives’) or the Tweedledees (mischaracterized as ‘left-wing liberals’) in their nation, and to loathe the other. Both sides have been infected with a belief that the ‘other’ represents an existential threat to everything they believe in.

But in fact, both the Tweedles represent entrenched, privileged caste interests that are reacting to the increasing evidence that our entire civilization is in an advanced, and uncontrollable, state of collapse, and worrying about who will control the lifeboats as it sinks. Both believe that their caste holds the moral high ground and that what they are doing is for the benefit of all, and that the ‘other’ side fails to appreciate that. Both adhere to fiercely-held ideologies that have been reinforced throughout their lives, but which have never actually been shown to work, anywhere. And both believe that the ‘other’, whether that be the “woke shitlibs” or the “deplorables”, are too stupid, too ignorant, and/or too disconnected from the citizenry and reality, to realize that their position is untenable.

And both have been conditioned, from within and from without, to be absolutely terrified of what extended control of the machinery of state by the ‘other’ would mean for everything they hold dear, and, to some extent, for our collective capacity to deal with accelerating collapse.

The following is a bit of an overstatement of these two castes’ positions, but I don’t think by much:

The Tweedledums: This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for authority, order, hierarchy, individual initiative, and ‘traditional’ ways of doing things, governed by a strict, lean, paternalistic elite that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by established ‘family values’ and by their interpretation of the will of their god.

The Tweedledees: This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by mutual care, affluence and relative equality for all, governed by a kind, thoughtful, educated, informed and representative elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of humanism and ‘fairness’.

In an age where everything appears out of control, both are trying to entrench and hold on to what control they (think they) have.

And in the US and its many vassal states, when you layer on both groups’ fervent belief in US exceptionalism (“we’re categorically smarter than the rest of the world, and hence exempt from the rules we arbitrarily force on everyone else”), and the American Dream (“you can be/do anything you want to be/do, if you work and fight hard enough”), you have a recipe for disaster.

Most readers of this blog would likely identify more with the Tweedledees than the Tweedledums. We tend to be well-educated, and believe that education is important. We tend to be well-read, and believe we are more well-informed, more ‘reasonable’, and (let’s face it) smarter than the Tweedledums. We tend to think our successes are personally deserved and our failures are systemic failures. We tend to be humanists, rather than believers in some higher power.

So, if you’re still with me, I’d like you to stop reading this now and read this new essay by Aurélien, Reality Would Like a Word, in its entirety. You may not like it — he’s skewering the Tweedledees, and not being gentle about it. It’s a bitter pill. But he’s not doing it as a Tweedledum, since he has even less use for their ideology and idiocy.

His basic message is: The Tweedledees have had power for most of the last seven decades, and have royally fucked up everything we’ve done, and then shrugged it off as if it wasn’t our doing, or wasn’t a big deal. And we’re still doing so. He says we need, as I said in my less gracious and less articulate recent rant, to get over ourselves, and to grow up. We’re flying full speed into the hurricanes of polycrisis and collapse, and our preoccupation with one-upping the Tweedledums, and with ‘social justice’ platitudes, incrementalism, technotopian thinking, niceties of speech, and mistaking virtue signalling, policy platforms, and wishful out-loud thinking for actual progress toward real goals, constitute a grossly negligent and staggeringly ignorant response to the existential crises of the day.

The Tweedledees’ mashup of social liberalism and neoliberalism, “one-world” strategies, public-private partnerships, outsourcing, privatization, centralization of services, underfunding to balance budgets, kowtowing to the military-industrial complex, over-reliance on consultants and idealized theories, abandoning the homeless and mentally ill and other underserved and disenfranchised groups to “allow them to sort things out for themselves”, endless compromise on core issues, both-sides-ing, support for misguided and mischaracterized wars, inattention to bureaucratic bloat — these idealistic and well-intentioned but practically unsupportable strategies have produced heavily-encumbered, stagnant, dysfunctional political systems that are incapable of change, and neither efficient nor effective, and ultimately unsupportable except by the most idealistic wearers of rose-coloured glasses.

And as this becomes increasingly clear — as the disaster in Ukraine makes it nine war disasters in a row while the drum beats for a tenth with China to try to break the losing streak (“we’re the good guys, and we’re exceptional, so we have to win in the end”), as ecological collapse worsens and the “we still have time if we only all…” rhetoric rings more and more hollow, as economic collapse rumbles in and then settles in indefinitely under the weight of our global crushing debt load to the earth and to future generations, as more and more countries reject the US-controlled IMF/World Bank/CIA/NATO systems of bullying, subjugation, resource theft, vassalage and penury, and turn against the west, as more and more countries collapse politically and economically and become failed states like Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, as… well I could go on, but you get the idea. As all this becomes clear, the Tweedledees will cease to be credible or electable, and with no alternative but the Tweedledums, the stage is set for decades of authoritarian, oppressive, dysfunctional rule, until the economic and ecological realities topple all the fragile and now impoverished domino governments, and we’re left with utter chaos.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m not going to proffer any solutions to this. Collapse is going to be hard, but it might be a little less awful if those of us who pride ourselves on our reason, our intelligence, our open-mindedness, our capacity to cooperate and explore new ways of being and doing things, wake up and smell the rotting corpse of our misplaced and failed idealism. There is nothing wrong with admitting failure — we did our best, and the result was… well, not so good. And largely on our watch. Admitting to our best-efforts failure, and admitting that there’s no inevitable Hollywood happy ending ahead (“if we only all just…”) would at least be a start to coming to grips with the unfolding disaster.

If we can do that, then it just might mean that rather than trying to replicate this failure as collapse brings down everything we tried to hold on to, we might instead follow Tyson Yunkaporta’s counsel to just pay attention to what is happening, accept it, adapt to it, foster the conditions for what seems to be needed to emerge, and let it emerge. And not try to impose any models or ideologies as we learn how to live, and to be, in collapsing and post-collapse societies. We’ve tried models and ideologies and “-isms”. Time to admit they were seemingly good ideas, but accept that they didn’t actually work in practice. And that, as a grim consequence, we have created a vacuum that will enable the equally ideological Tweedledums to wreak havoc, on top of all our other polycrisis challenges, for at least the next few decades.

If you haven’t yet, please read Aurélien’s post at the link above. It’s an eye-opener, at a time we really need our eyes opened.

And if you have read it, then you might be ready for John Michael Greer’s newest article, which reiterates the same unhappy truths, from an American rather than a European perspective.

Voices of sober sanity, at last.