Opinion: Why We Lost the Future

The following column appeared previously in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

The Democratic Party is consumed with its defeat. The discussion goes back and forth between finger-pointing, navel gazing, terrified wailing, and depression. Of course there is a recognition of what victories there were and a renewed determination to keep the orange monster and his minions at bay. But right now what I see is a free-for-all discussion of the causes of the disaster.

A number of arguments are being put forward. Harris didn’t state enough policies. Harris didn’t speak to the working class. She didn’t go on Joe Rogan. She closed the campaign from Washington D.C. She is a she. She didn’t condemn Israel enough. She didn’t support Israel enough. She was elevated to her candidacy by Biden instead of winning it in a vigorous primary. She ran a terrible campaign. She ran a great campaign, but the voters didn’t see how well the economy is doing. The economy is terrible for a lot of people. Eggs are $3 a dozen. Etc., etc., etc.

While there are certainly valid points to be made in the context of national electoral politics, I think there is a larger trend at work. All over the world, including in the United States, authoritarians and parties of the far right are gaining ground. Anti-immigrant sentiment is rising. Populists make grand claims about changes to the status quo. Elites and woke warriors are to blame for everything.

Most of these statements and opinions fly in the face of reality. Economic news is mixed, but the world is more affluent than ever. Most people in this country and most industrial economies are getting by at least as well as they ever have. Most people in the world have no personal acquaintance with a person who doesn’t use non-standard pronouns. Most people don’t know any “men” in “women’s” sports. Why do so many people think the world is headed in the wrong direction? 

Because it is, but not in the way the populists and right wingers claim. For the last 300 years the human race has been claiming more and more of the natural wealth of the planet. The process has gone far enough that we are in the midst of a sixth great extinction event. The minerals that we are digging out of the ground and the topsoil we mine to grow our food are starting to give out. Meanwhile, we have so polluted the environment that clean water is turning into a commodity and the air is sometimes almost opaque. For the first time in human history there is a Northwest Passage. Back to back hurricanes have only underscored the fact that oceanfront properties can no longer be insured.

The factor that has brought the damage we do to the environment into a more universal awareness is the climate crisis. One of the issues that is driving the rightward political wave is immigration, which at its root is a result largely of climate change and population pressures. Tribal and pseudo-nationalist movements in the global south and the resulting wars are caused, directly or indirectly, by resource issues which are in turn caused, directly or indirectly, by climate change. Waves of immigrants are the result of crop failures, caused by floods and droughts. Housing is in desperately short supply in much of the developed world, caused at least partly by immigration. The Covid-19 pandemic was just one of a number of real and potential new plagues, brought about by changes in the movements of animal and insect species.

Most people can sense, even as they claim the opposite, that the earth has had its fill of us, that there are too many of us, that we have skewed the chemistry of the biosphere, that the natural world is out of balance and the environment is swinging around to redress that imbalance and punish us. We may not be willing to acknowledge it, but we can feel it in our bones. We are afraid.

A natural reaction to fear is denial and irrational anger. We know that we have gone past a tipping point, and we are afraid to face up to the consequences. We blame others. We crave a cleansing violence. We want to burn it all down. We are thrilled to see the violence, even those of us who don’t want to be any closer to it than our televisions.

We want a strong leader, one who promises to save us, one who tells the comforting lie that we are not to blame, that someone else has done this to us, one who reaffirms our feeling that the world is out of control while promising to make it all better. We don’t really believe it, but we want to believe it.

In The Grand Inquisitor Dostoevsky wrote, “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’” That is what our nation voted for on Election Day.

Lou Conover is a resident of Amherst’s District 1