OK, it's 1978. We're Sue Malden. Let's take a look in the vaults and see what's missing. All the things that oh you know I was sure we had it somewhere but it turns out we lost it some time back without really noticing.
Direct democracy is a dead loss. Globally, a complete dead loss. For it to function effectively it requires both a populace knowledgable about the principles underlying democratic governance and a commitment to comity which provably does not exist right now. Democracy is now a product, shorn of all meaning and significance.
Ironically enough, this also kind of screws the pooch on capitalism. The entire historical basis of capitalism's accomplishments has been free trade. Free trade is dead. The Eurozone is dead. London, the banking capital of the world, is dead. Future employment will mainly consist of poor people scamming other poor people for the benefit of supremely amoral rich people- not much of an extrapolation, we're already most of the way there. We are now significantly less likely to be replaced by robots in the immediate future.
Speaking of which, futurism. I'm kind of really glad to get rid of this, to be honest, because technofuturists annoyed the fuck out of me. The hell with futurism, we don't even have a present. We can stop talking about "post-scarcity", because we're heading for massively increased amounts of resource scarcity in the foreseeable future. The only "singularity" we're heading for is nuclear apocalypse.
Having said that, even with everything thrown out the window... Nuclear apocalypse is not an inevitability, I'll say that, even given that a self-evidently mentally unstable megalomaniac has his hand on the nuclear button of what was, until recently, the world's biggest superpower. I'm not saying that we shouldn't _worry_ about mass nuclear death, but there's some chance it might not happen.
Contrast: environmental apocalypse. Oh, yes. Science is on the chopping block, particularly climate science. Neo-lysenkoism is the official order of the day. The plus side, I guess, is that the impending climate catastrophe won't actually do much to destroy the existing political, social, and economic order, because we've actually managed to beat Mother Nature to the punch. Well, go humanity.
Honesty in government. I can't see this sticking around much longer. When you have a President who campaigned for and was legitimately elected President on the basis of complete and utter lies, saying that government ought not to be corrupt is about as plausible as saying we all ought to have hoverboards.
Let's see. The media is completely dead. All the magazines and newspapers should probably just close up shop right now. If you're a journalist, you should find another line of work. Let's call a code on free speech as well. A guy whose campaign was largely predicated on threats of violence against the media is not exactly going to be a staunch protector of the First Amendment. On top of that, when you have two sides with a mutual refusal to acknowledge each other's legitimacy, you know, we stop thinking of this as a right worth fighting to protect.
We all thought there would be violence. No matter what side you were on, violence seemed inevitable. Well, we were wrong on that. Just like the Communists, when the time came, we gladly relinquished our ideals without putting up a fight. The only violence we're going to have is legitimized political violence. Which, let's be honest, we already have. Police can kill black men based on the color of their skin with impunity. It's not going to get worse, because the white majority politely overlooks what's already there. The justice system is facing the same fate as the other pillars of democracy.
Corollary is that private firearm ownership will almost certainly remain legal in the US. Because, again, there's not going to be a mass organized, armed resistance movement. It's OK to have a situation where somebody uses legally purchased firearms to commit a terrorist mass murder and nobody says boo about limiting people's right to bear arms. These things happen, you know. So sad. You would have thought that ban on Muslims would have stopped this sort of thing.
The impending ban on abortion will likely prove about as effective on the War on Drugs. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd be pretty upset about Roe v. Wade being overturned, but given that the rule of law has basically been rendered meaningless I can't see myself getting too upset over it.
One World Government is certainly out the window. Yes, yes, I can hear some of you applauding from here, though I confess I really have no idea why. Mass balkanization, I think that's going to be the order of the day. The only government left that could plausibly rule the world is China, and they don't seem to be terribly interested in ruling us barbarians. The idea of a World War III, of course we're all afraid of it, but the notion that anybody would sign a Triple Entente, and even if they did, that nation-states would _comply_ with their treaty obligations, is a little hard to credit at this remove.
We will see a lot more Syrias, I think. All over the world, localized genocides will be on the increase. The 20th century world order was not really that effective at preventing or stopping these genocides in the first place, so I'm not sure I'd count that as a "loss". We'll just stop talking about our moral obligations in Rwanda or wherever.
Thinking about it... this isn't so much a triumph of straight up fascism, or totalitarianism. This is a triumph of Third World political structures. The United States is now a banana republic. Probably Britain, too. The great powers of the capitalist age... I'd get sentimental if I didn't have to live through it.
What's the worst thing for me about this, the loss of the concept of universal human rights, the loss of the notion of humanity as a species rather than a series of ethnic tribes, barely even registers on this. It's no wonder that we never had class warfare like Marx predicted. We never got beyond being tribes. We never actually developed what Marx thought was a "class consciousness".
Perhaps because the notion that we ever believed in human rights was, looking back, the greatest illusion, the unsustainable lie. A figment of our collective imagination. How do you make universal human rights real? Do you kill for it? No? Oh, I see, billboards and television ads. Maybe an Internet browser plugin, maybe a smartphone app. Did we honestly believe that? That billboards and television ads could elevate us, that we could "fix" human nature? This elaborate Bismarckian charade of subliminal carrots and sticks, it was to transform us into cherubim? It was going to make us _sane_?
