Thu, 4 Jul 2024 – Copyedited as of Mon, 10 Mar 2025
Part I: Slow motion apocalypse
Hollywood did us a disservice. “Which one?” I hear you ask. Fair point. The particular disservice I have in mind is the way our popular zeitgeist is awash with apocalyptic fiction in which the apocalypse is sudden, unpredictable, and rapidly decimates the global order, plunging us into a variety of dystopian hellscapes, either social or environmental or both. We do not have as much in the way of a modern mainstream mythos providing a metaphorical parallel for the apocalypse now upon us.
Ours is a slow motion apocalypse, playing out with enough rapidity as to be observable in real time—fast enough to be witnessed and understood—but across implicit timescales just immense enough to remove immediate consequences from the realm of pragmatic, day-to-day, individual human experience.
To wit, last week (as of this writing), the Supreme Court effectively criminalized human existence for those who fall below an economic threshold, entirely dismantled the ability of the state to rely on subject matter experts for regulation, and gutted the minimal remaining Constitutional safeguards preventing a criminal president from seizing the reins of power permanently. And while all that was happening, I carried on living out the mundanity of modern life: I went to work; I ate food; I washed the dishes; I did my laundry; I checked the mail; I paid the rent; and so on. What else could I do?
And that's the problem. No one has a good answer for "What else could I do?" Not one that I've heard, anyway.
We are now active participants in our own demise. And our demise is not going to look like we thought it might. It won't be sensationalized, and whatever pieces of it do get sensationalized will only serve to distract from the ruthless pragmatism of the Machiavellian rightwing power mongers distorting our former US republic into an ideologically inbred fascist backwater.
We were so preoccupied by George Orwell’s technocratic nightmare found in the omnipresent eyes of Big Brother that we failed to recognize or appreciate Sinclair Lewis’s Berzelius Windrip even though he was right here in the room with us, biding his time. And now, he doesn't have to wait much longer.
The Supreme Court has, effectively, given Project 2025 the green light. The rule of law no longer holds any meaning. The rightwing establishment is no longer even paying lip service to checks and balances. Not only can it happen here, it is currentlyhappening here. And it will get substantially worse on every conceivable level.
They're coming for Obergefell.
They're coming for contraception.
They're coming for education.
They're coming for journalism.
They're coming for labor.
They're coming for the very concept of civil rights.
They're coming for every hard fought progressive victory that has ever been won and, once they've obliterated all of those, they still won't be satisfied.
Project 2025 is not an endgame; it's a starting line.
We’re collectively failing a key existential test. Even if our species survives the ongoing (and worsening) social and ecological apocalypse, we’re actively building a future in which that existential survival is likely to be little better than a pyrrhic victory for the vast majority of the surviving population.
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Part II: A uniquely leftwing problem
Those of us left of center face a unique challenge, a challenge the political right simply doesn't experience in the same way: We're averse to authoritarianism. Oh, the rightwing will say they love freedom and hate tyranny, but the voracity of their claims is only true in the most superficial ways, and the logic underpinning rightwing ideas of freedom falls apart upon the slightest broadening of the sociopolitical aperture. But ultimately, once they achieve general values alignment with their leaders, conservative constituents fall in with the party line, even when the party line is a self-inflicted injury.
Compare: in the previous paragraph, I belabored over what word to use to begin. Initially, I’d written “Progressives face a unique challenge…” but upon review I realized “progressive” might not be an ideologically inclusive enough label to achieve my intended purposes. So then I thought, maybe I should try “Liberals face a unique challenge…” and I encountered the same issue. Progressives, liberals, leftists, communists, Marxists, anarchists, and what have you are all leftwing ideologies, but they’re all distinct ideologies, and many of them are antagonistic to each other. So I ultimately landed on “Those of us left of center face a unique challenge…”
In ideological terms, this makes a certain level of psychological sense. In practical terms, though, this results in the platonic form of the aphoristic expression "herding cats." We on the left have this maddening tendency to demand ideological purity, but we can’t agree on which ideology to use as the arbiter of said purity. And because of this, there can be no purity, which ultimately results in a disintegration of unity, even at the expense of broadly aligned political aims (at least in terms of preferable immediate outcomes).
In this modern age of online discourse (insofar as it can technically be construed as “discourse”), too many rifts occur due to a perceived breach in ideological purity. No matter that the desired outcome of each party involved is broadly aligned, because we disagree on the details, we’d rather burn the whole project to the ground than compromise.
The disorganization and infighting on the political left disallows an effective political movement in pragmatic terms. The right faces no such dilemma.
Sure, the wild immaturity and ideological cannibalism demonstrated by the furthest right members of the House of Representatives seems to undercut my point that infighting is a uniquely leftwing problem. But that seeming contradiction is superficial. In reality, the dysfunction in Congress is a feature of the rightwing playbook, not a bug.
The right needs to demonize the government, needs to prove to the American people the government doesn't work, needs to maintain a state of mainstream dissatisfaction and distrust in elected officials. The right needs all of this in place so that the public will be ready for their strongman. They need the public to be primed to believe a would-be tyrant when he says that, "Only I can fix it."
In tandem with congressional dysfunction, they need judicial overreach to systematically dismantle the administrative state and pave the way for a unitary executive to swoop in and remake the federal government into a bludgeon that can be used against newly defined enemies of the state.
The right did not begin this play for power in 2016. The sudden rightward lurches into naked fascism we've taken since 2016 are the culmination of decades of political organizing and Machiavellian game theory. Iterations of these fascistic power brokers have been present since the founding of our nation, and the goals have only aesthetically evolved to make them seem palatable in so-called polite company. The endgame is not appreciably different than it was since time in memorial: power for the few, oppression for the many.
Because the right is not averse to authoritarianism in the way the left is, we're seeing a fracture in perceived reality emerge and take hold of the American people. This bifurcation of reality has already happened; the gap is only widening.
We don’t merely disagree on key political issues anymore. We no longer inhabit the same fundamental awareness of reality. It's not that I disagree with a similarly situated rightwing ideologue, it's that the reality of our respective individual perceptions are mutually incompatible with one another. We can’t even have a good faith debate because we cannot agree on the most basic of premises or definitions.
The political right cares about the ends far above the means. If it furthers their ideological objectives, they're willing to stomach levels of cognitive dissonance that I find utterly intolerable. What this means in practice is that objective reality and factual beliefs are irrelevant if they interfere with the endgame, which provides a strongman would-be dictator unimpeachable rhetorical leeway.
So long as his goals align with those of his supporters, any lies, falsehoods, or disinformation can be accepted uncritically as Truth, at least until the next lie contradicts that former Truth and replaces it with a new Truth.
On the left, insofar as I've been able to observe, we care about the means more than we do the ends, and even the suggestion of compromise is anathema. It doesn't matter how aligned we are on desired outcome. If your means don't look exactly like my means, then fuck the ends altogether; I'm taking my ball and going home. I'd rather watch the whole thing burn to the ground than to compromise my ideological purity for the sake of a greater good.
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Part III: Game theory in a broken system
As a nation, we're currently failing in every way that matters so I understand the intuitive appeal of accelerationism. For me, it's born of moral fatigue. The system is broken. It fails repeatedly and routinely. Worse than that, though, many of those failures—like the aforementioned congressional dysfunction—are features rather than bugs. Given all of this, it’s tempting to say, "The whole game is rigged. We need a new game."
I don't even disagree with that sentiment in a paradigmatic sense. We do need a new game. But a basketball player doesn't get to decide to be a football player simply because they're fed up with the rules of basketball. This is the game. We can play and win; we can play and lose; we can refuse to play and forfeit (which is indistinguishable from losing); or, we can discard the rules altogether, disrupt the game itself, and replace it with something else entirely.
Playing and winning or losing has been the traditional path toward progress in the American experiment as we have known it. There are certainly elements of disruption there as well (protests or strikes, for example), but rather than changing the game, the disruptions have by and large served to improve the fairness of the game. This form of change is incremental, incomplete, and intolerably slow on an individual scale. It's easy to be disillusioned with it. I am just as jaded as the next disaffected and frustrated constituent you might encounter.
Not playing and forfeiting is the strategy progressive third party voters engaged in back in 2016. This is not to say their concerns were unfounded or their ideals were impure, but their math was deeply flawed and they effectively handed the judiciary to fascists. Sure, they didn't actively vote for fascism, but in a binary system where power is guaranteed to one of two political parties, they were either naive in thinking that their third party candidate stood a chance, or they utterly failed in thinking through the inevitable outcome of their poor game theory.
Because that's what all of this is: game theory. And the far right is demonstrating intensely superior gamesmanship. They are succeeding in warping the purported rules of the game to suit their utilitarian purposes, even while Democrats ostensibly hold executive power. Rightwing strategists have played the brutal long game and are seeing the fruits of their labor whereas leftists, liberals, progressives et al are bemoaning the pace of the game and blaming each other for change not happening fast enough.
That's an unfair characterization, of course. I'm trying to illustrate a utilitarian point looking at outcomes rather than intent. As I've said, I largely agree with the desired ultimate outcomes of many Jill Stein voters, disillusioned democratic socialists, and even many leftist anarchists.
On an individual level, I find many of them incredibly intelligent, compelling, and far better educated than I am on several important subjects. On an individual level, so many of them are doing the critical work of unpacking all of the internalized "isms" that have plagued this nation since its inception. I respect and admire many them and even find some of their convictions to be morally superior to my own, which repeatedly challenges me toward intellectual honesty and humility.
Here's my issue: a morally superior conviction that, in effect, directly contributes to a morally depraved outcome is not morally justifiable as a strategy.
We need agitators. We need dissent. We need people fed up with the status quo, and who demand better. We need disruptors who persist in the face of resistance from the halls of power. And we also need to understand where we live. We need to think through the actual impact of our demands for ideological purity.
Which brings me to those who would seek to discard the rules, disrupt the game, and replace it with something else; namely: accelerationists.
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Part IV: A case against accelerationism
Accelerationists appear on both the left and the right. This is not to suggest that their goals are remotely similar, but their shared belief that the current social order is so fundamentally flawed as to be intractably irredeemable has me existentially worried.
And again, to be clear, I'm not worried because I disagree with their conclusions as such; I'm worried because I don't think the left fully appreciates what the right is capable of. This is one of the more upsetting symptoms of the disintegration of our sense of shared reality.
I live in Seattle, WA—allegedly a bastion of progressive politics (but you wouldn't know it on the municipal level). I know or know of a lot of self-described socialists, communists, and anarchists. In the realm of theory, we each have significant overlap in values and moral positions. But in praxis, our alignment falls apart in meaningful ways.
I grew up in Chewelah, WA—a small, rural town in one of the most impoverished counties in the state with virulently conservative politics, including some circles that were (or became) exemplars of xenophobic christofascism, white Christian nationalism, and somehow also Ayn Rand libertarianism. All the prototypical ideologies necessary for fascism to bloom were present when I lived there and they have only further metastasized since I left.
When I hear a left coast anarchist talk about how we need to dismantle the state, how we need a revolution, I find it incredibly difficult to fathom the naiveté with which they seem to misunderstand their ideological opposites. We can't even get progressives to agree that holding their nose and voting for Hillary Clinton would be less bad than seeing Donald Trump in the White House; do leftists really think they're going to convince enough like-minded individuals to join in a revolution? And even if they could, then what?
I find the abstract concept of anarchism morally appealing. The abolition of authoritative hierarchies in favor of a social community centered on collectivism and mutual aid sounds idyllic to me. But I remain unconvinced that such a social framework could possibly be sustained on a global scale given our human bent toward self-destructive tribalism and Us vs. Them thinking.
I'm not saying it's an impossible end state—nothing in the laws of physics, or even human nature, precludes it as a theoretically possible eventuality—but I am saying we do not currently have anything remotely close to the necessary ideological substrate out of which such a utopia could be born.
But do you know who does have the necessary ideological substrate out of which their purported utopia can be born? Rightwing accelerationists.
The right has been laying the groundwork for the failure of the state for decades. They have been working tirelessly to dismantle bureaucratic effectiveness and denigrate federalism in the public consciousness. They have been priming their base for authoritarianism. By virtue signaling an air of respectability politics to assuage the fears of centrists and dog whistling to the violent underground—the would-be brown shirts—the rightwing accelerationist playbook is coming dangerously close to fruition. All the individual pieces are now in place and all that remains is the final catalyzing event to let loose the end of the world as we know it.
In the event of a catastrophic breakdown in our social fabric, up to and including a second civil war, the conflict will not be a binary fight along geographically definable lines as it was in the 1860s. Today's body politic, while certainly divided into a similar factional binary, is no longer geographically distinct. A breakdown in social order on the magnitude of a civil war would incur such death and suffering as we have never before imagined.
This is not to belittle the genocides we have collectively allowed, aided, or committed as a nation; this is to say that the possible violence looming in the disconcertingly near future has the potential to be boundless and indefinitely sustained.
I have nightmares of a near future where American federalism collapses and is replaced by a confederation of regional warlords who have divided the contiguous US into authoritarian fiefdoms plagued by internal strife and oppression, at best. At worst, this nightmare is a barbaric slide into something like the European dark ages. In whatever form this nightmare takes, the subsequent fracture and disintegration of what remains of the global community would irrevocably yield cataclysmic social consequences on a par with nuclear Armageddon.
Up until the past week in particular (as of this writing), these nightmares remained in the realm of frightening fantasy. And while it's a fool's errand to try to predict the future, I'm seeing pieces of this apocalyptic puzzle fall into place in real time. It's not Apocalypse Now, but it is apocalypse soon.
And it's an apocalypse of our own making.
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Part V: The courage of despair
In their terrifyingly prescient tome, Generations, published in 1990, Strauss and Howe write, "[T]he Lost [Generation] faced the future armed only with the courage of despair" (pg. 257). If you aren't familiar with their generational theory of American history, I'll sum up with this oversimplification: US history, they suggest, follows a predictable cyclical pattern of secular crisis and spiritual rebirth; this cycle in its current form dates back to the 1580s, is driven by recursive generational dynamics, is comprised of four parts they call “Turnings”, and has repeated as consistently as the four seasons with only one aberration disrupting this four-part cycle in the aftermath of the American Civil War.
The above quote spoke to me on a personal level and now informs my view on the tribulations ahead.
Let's start with the personal.
My life has been fraught with existential exhaustion. While I may not have had words to describe it at the time, even in childhood I resented my own existence. I looked toward the future and saw nothing there I found particularly appealing. As early as seven years old, I'd already seen the Sisyphean monotony of the adult world and wanted no part of it.
As I entered adulthood, I found my childhood intuitions proved true far more often than not. And with the foundations of a suicidal bent established in childhood, my young adulthood years saw gradually (but consistently) declining mental health. It wasn't until the past two years, though, that it all reached a boiling point of dangerous proportions.
For more than half of my waking life since April of 2022, I've existed somewhere on the suicidal spectrum between ideation and intent. It's not that I want to die, it's that being conscious is exhausting and unsustainable as a baseline. More than the past two years of my life have been spent in the mire of psychic agony.
Here's an interesting side effect of living with suicidality that I would not have anticipated prior: suicidality brings with it an internal confidence, groundedness, and even equanimity that allows for levels of empathy and courage I had not previously found accessible (this is true of the way I experience suicidality; individual results may vary; I don’t recommend it).
If the anticipated relief promised by the terminus of this mortal coil already allures you, traditional attempts at coercion are ineffective. Appeals to my sense of self-preservation can only fail. I don't wish to preserve myself. I would just as soon dissipate into the uniform nonentity of the unconscious universe. And this detachment, borne by despair, counterintuitively instills in me a sense of twisted empowerment.
Because here's the thing: I haven't wanted to be alive since April of 2022, and yet here I persist in corporeal form; I persist in dogged pursuit of healing; I persist on an inexorable march toward the oftentimes vain hope that—if I simply buy myself enough time—I will build a life I want to live rather than a life I want to leave. I persist in all this, and I find it hard to believe that I will survive beyond the age of forty.
I fear I may have discovered the underlying problem giving rise to my suicidality too late for any hope of successful intervention. And yet, I persist. I face the future armed only with the courage of despair.
Even if my case truly is hopeless, perhaps by my perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds, I can empower those around me to find hope for themselves, hope that does stand a chance at actualization. Perhaps, even in my failure, seeds of success can be planted for others.
I take a similar view in looking toward the future of our body politic. It's entirely possible that we're doomed. It's entirely possible that there is no hope. It's entirely possible that we have already failed and that our collective failure only appears to be contingent due to temporal technicalities.
But we must persist. Even in despair, we must face the future armed with the courage of the damned. We must agitate for total victory over the foundational sins of our fathers, but in pursuit of that total victory, we must not deny a small win simply because other battles remain.
I'm not advocating for incrementalism; I agree with the accelerationists that it's too late for that. Instead, I'm advocating against collective suicide simply because we don't have time left to pursue incremental and insufficient victories.
Maybe we're already lost. Maybe it's too late. Maybe everything is entirely fucked and cannot be unfucked.
But maybe, if we buy ourselves enough time, we can create a better future than the one now glowering down upon us. If we give up and decide to burn it all down, those prior "maybes" will only solidify into definite realities rather than frightening counterfactuals.
The arc of the moral universe is indeed long, and it may well bend toward justice, but only because those who long for justice actively bend it. Progress is the cumulative result of countless mundane steps forward, and it is the opposite of inevitable. Just as the Second Law dictates that—in the absence of organizational energy to the contrary—the inevitable progression of a physical system is increasing entropy, so in the same way does the inevitable progression of a social system like ours dissolve into authoritarianism and worse unless we continually organize against that progression.
I am intimately familiar with the desire to burn it all down. I face that desire on a personal level every day. So far, I haven't given up, but the desire to do so is a powerfully seductive force. Like it or not, we the US electorate are faced with a binary decision this year: the maintenance of a problematic status quo that nevertheless affords the theoretical possibility for eventual progress, or the surrender to a fascist overthrow of our former social order where any hope of near-term progress will be thwarted, undermined, and stillborn.
In practical terms, anything other than the former will produce the latter.
I don't like being held hostage to this system any more than anyone else. It is unacceptable and unjust. And yet, here we are, at a crossroads with no way back from whichever path we choose.
And no matter which path we choose, after having chosen, we can only march forward.
I fear that enough of the electorate is disillusioned to the point of accelerationism. And I fear that only the right is prepared for the consequences. So, in the chilling words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, if my fellow left-leaning citizens decide to give up on the American experiment now in large enough numbers to see donald’s return to the White House, it is "[w]ith fear for our democracy, I dissent."