Walking the 2020 Election Back from the Edge of Destruction

The potential for revolutionary change without a revolution

Photo by Josh Barwick on Unsplash

By Mike Meyer

How close are we to the edge? An edge defines a point beyond which there is no return. It may also be the point of final collapse or death.

The great fear since the questionable election of Trump is how fast are we being driven to the edge of an abyss beyond which we have no hope of return. The first two years of this was a group attempt to evaluate this risk while denying its reality.

Given the American cultural allergy to history the justifications of safety needed to be found in existing cultural or political characteristics. History is denied validity in this American situation because past occurrences were not American.

This was, of course, based in American Exceptionalism. Interestingly that has been destroyed in this situation. In the descent into fascist hate and authoritarianism there is no American Exceptionalism. That returns us to history. The low information nature of opportunists who instinctively create fascist regimes is to fall back on lies about history to increase fear and denounce all but their most mindless followers.

People interpret history primarily for political purposes and only some times for educational objectives. For political purposes history is seen as repeating itself. The horrible things that once happened are about to happen again unless this one thing is changed.

But history does not repeat itself. It is, in almost all cases, a spiral rather than a circle. We live in multiple levels of cyclic patterns but each brings into play new variables. These produce recursive sequences that factor both new and old variables into the process. This is a complex process.

Fascists in all forms use the simplistic threat of repeating history to excite fear in their followers. As advocates of chaos they have no interest in a coherent historical analysis or even anything other than the crudest common elements of cultural history. That, of course, leaves far more out than it includes.

This is dangerous even though it is, in the 21st century, a cliche and has been for nearly a hundred years. It…