Twilight of the Monsters

The Forward March of MAGA halted?

History is on no one’s side, even if we sometimes like to believe that it might be on ours. When we talk about the ‘judgement of history’, or being on the ‘right side of history’, we are always projecting our own hopes onto a future that we have no way of knowing will turn out the way we want.

It brings consolation in bad times to believe that history may be waiting to vindicate us or that things that are wrong will ultimately be put right.

It’s comforting, especially in a world where the worst and most corrupt people seem to get away with everything, to imagine that somewhere in the future, historians will look back on our era and deliver the damning judgement that too often the present fails to pronounce. To imagine that possibility is to imagine that the dark times will have been vanquished and surpassed by better ones.

But history offers no such guarantees. And regardless of where we think it’s going or where we would like it to go, we may find that it takes us to some unpredictable and unwanted places. Consider the predictions that were made at the end of the Cold War.

This was the time when ‘walls’ were supposedly crumbling everywhere, when democracy seemed to many to be an unstoppable process, when the advent of a borderless world based on trade, connectivity and global markets seemed to point towards a future without political or armed conflicts, where history itself would come to an ‘end.’

No one imagined that the same countries which hailed a borderless world would erect ‘hard’ militarised borders to keep out poor migrants from the global south.

No one foresaw that democracies would swoon in the arms of authoritarian nationalists, charlatans and brazen con men, who boast about how many drug addicts their police forces have murdered, who mock a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of their own citizens, or incite armed insurrection when they fail to win an election.

Who could have predicted that, thirty-two years later, pundits in the country that ‘won’ the Cold War would be seriously discussing the possibility of civil war, and that voters would send a malevolent narcissistic sociopath to the White House, and then continue to vote for him even after four years in which lies rained down on them on a scale never seen in American history?

The world was supposed to be too intelligent and too enlightened for that. Hadn’t we learned the ‘lessons of history?’ from World War 2 and the Holocaust, from Europe’s ‘age of dictatorships’? Didn’t we recognise that democracies can be fought for and defended, but also given up? Couldn’t we read the telltale signs that indicated a slide into authoritarianism and fascism?

Having seen how Nazism invented false racist conspiracies in order to justify genocide, weren’t we wise enough to look askance at cynical two-bit demagogues ranting on their YouTube channels or social media platforms about evil ‘global elites’ controlling and dictating everything, from migration to pandemics?

Apparently not. And the 21st century has reminded us something that we should have already known: that even the most stable societies can fall apart and succumb to their own worst instincts; that voters, faced with the choice of the least bad, the lesser evil or simply something mediocre, and a brazen monstrosity, will sometimes go - smiling and waving the national flag - with the monstrosity, because why the hell not?

The Age of Monsters

This is the era in which we find ourselves, and for those of us not celebrating or revelling in the new-found ‘freedoms’ to be the worst you can be that this age of monsters has conferred on us, it has been a painful and distressing experience to watch this bleak endless parade of the bad and the worst, pouring through public life like the contents of a broken sewer pipe.

Faced with this seemingly unstoppable descent, there have been some positive developments that at least provide a breathing space and grounds for hope, however insubstantial and belated.

The public outrage and disgust that forced Johnson’s own MPs to reluctantly take action against him; the stunning implosion of Liz Truss’s non-government and the failure of Johnson’s attempted comeback; Lula’s victory in Brazil - all these outcomes are to be welcomed, even they aren’t a cause for ecstatic celebration.

And now, against all the odds, the Republican Party has drastically underperformed in mid-term elections when it would normally be expected to make huge gains. To put it more precisely, Trump has drastically underperformed, and a number of high-profile candidates that he personally endorsed have fallen at the first or second hurdle.

It might seem a little underwhelming to take some consolation from the fact that the Democratic Party didn’t lose by as much as it was expected to lose by, and still stands to lose the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, but beggars can’t be choosers and this result is definitely worse for the Republicans than it is for the Democrats.

It’s already causing ructions and recriminations within the Republican party, and - without wanting to tempt history again- may prove to be a watershed moment that changes America’s seemingly relentless downhill trajectory.

Had the Republicans met expectations, they might well have used their position not only to stymie any legislation they don’t like, but also to halt the Jan 6th Committee’s investigations into Trump’s role in the Capitol insurrection.

Now they can’t, at least not so easily. Now the Trump bully pulpit looks suddenly shaky, and he may yet be kicked off it by a craven party that only values those who can help it win. Or the party will rip itself to pieces as the embittered narcissist seeks to undermine any potential successor.

So all this good, even if it isn’t great. And the huge participation of young voters that helped make this happen is another sign that the rancid reactionary politics that Trump embodied and emboldened may be losing their wider purchase.

None of this is a reason to put out the party balloons. Because Trump may be dying, but Trumpism is very far from dead. Millions of Americans will still vote for him or for someone like Ron DeSantis, who ships migrants across the country in a Trumpite attack on ‘woke elites.’ Political rabble and far-right conspiracy theorists like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene walked easily back into office.

In Brazil the same caution should be applied. Lula may have won, just. But 52 million Brazilians still voted for the gangster-politician who mocked the virus that killed so many people, and who revelled in his willingness to burn down the Amazon regardless of the consequences for his country or the planet. In the UK, the fall of the corrupt Johnson and the epically useless Truss threatens to usher in a new period of Tory austerity in a country where public services have already been cut to the bone.

But nevertheless, Lula did win, and now has a chance to make Brazil a better country than it could ever have been under Bolsonaro. And the midterms have provided the Democrats with a platform that they can build on in the next election, and a new constituency that the Republicans will struggle to reach. In the UK, the Sunak/Hunt tandem now faces a divided and demoralised Tory party, an opposition that now senses that its moment has come, and opposition from unions across the country that have had enough, to the point when even nurses are now coming out on strike.

So by the dismal standards of our ongoing age of monsters, when the worst thing always seems to be waiting around the corner, the autumn of 2022 has not been as bad as it could be.

And regardless of where history ends up in the long term, the present is still in our hands, and the future is still ours to win or lose.