Posted Wednesday night, April 24, 2019.
The Berlin Wall falling, November 1989. Almay photo via the Guardian.
Americans and Europeans were guided [through the end of the 20th Century and into the 21st] by a tale about “the end of history, by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness…
...Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans...kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter of a century after the end of communism, and so raised a generation without history.
The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social good taken for granted elsewhere---education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave vacations---Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.
---from “The Road to Unfreedom” by Timothy Snyder.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.