Study: Don’t Give Up Hope

Not all U-Turns are created equal as the authors note, and an “average U-Turn episode lasts eight years and results in either restored (70 out of 102 cases) or even improved (22 out of 102 cases) levels of democracy.” This lines up with my gut sense that America has two presidential election cycles to figure our shit out or else we are destined to become the West’s version of Russia.

Some may furrow their brows and scoff at this notion of academic proof of hope, but there are a wave of memes right now depicting Americans as bitter and isolated Squidward watching South Korea and Brazil as Spongebob and Patrick joyously indicting their criminal presidents for crimes they committed. U-Turns are real to some degree and even if we don’t know it, our memes do. Speaking as an elder millennial coated in a thick layer of irony at all times, I understand the urge to assume we live in hell and nothing will ever change, but this is not the moment for it. We need hope and strength, not cowardice and cynicism.

Cowards like the American elite cower in this moment. They are fundamentally incapable of operating within a society they are not exploiting, and so they will choose the comforting cocoon of autocracy over the friction of competition. We on the left always talk about capitalists choosing fascists as a foregone conclusion, but that doesn’t mean fascism always wins when that happens. We focus so much on the German example from the early 20th century, to our own detriment, when there are far more hopeful examples around the world.

Doomers always seem to try to contextualize ourselves in some year within Weimar Germany’s downfall or Nazi Germany’s rise without ever acknowledging one slight difference between them and us: we don’t have a ton of grizzled World War I veterans looking for work. Every discussion about becoming the Nazis inherently misses the point because Hitler explicitly cited us as inspiration. We obnoxious, loudmouth Americans cannot be anyone but Americans. We proved that at the Ryder Cup. However this fascist coup is going to unfold, it will be American in nature, not German.

And America itself has already pulled off at least one of these U-Turns. We fought a whole Civil War over a fascist vision of a slave-driven society or not that, and in the Reconstruction Era afterwards, such immense democratic reforms were made that once illiterate slaves became literate and served as representatives of the people in government. This vast progress so enraged the autocratic fascists in the South that they incited a reactionary terror campaign broadly referred to as Jim Crow that rolled back this progress. Eventually, those autocrats lost to the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, which produced its own backlash and autocrats who are now rolling back all the societal gains of the last century. Time in America is a flat circle, to some degree.

This U-Turn even happened in the realm of economics, as our modern and past Gilded Ages could be described as fascist in nature just given how much power capitalism centralizes in the largest shareholders’ hands and how much power those people have over society. Rank greed and a wildly unhealthy and inequal economy eventually led to a generational economic crash in 1929, and people suffered under the scarcity the Great Depression imposed afterwards. This mass suffering led to the New Deal, a series of gargantuan economic reforms that helped birth the most powerful middle class in human history and drag millions of seniors off the streets and out of poverty while curtailing the power of the powerful. America has already proven its capacity to make big democratic changes in the face of complete collapse multiple times, and only a cynic would think we couldn’t do it again, especially when this study suggests that across the world, U-Turns are the norm, not the exception.