To expand a bit on what I posted almost two months ago, I am getting gloomier and gloomier by the day right now. First, there's the very real possibility that the current situation will lead to the nuclear annihilation of humankind - people fairly high up in the Russian hierarchy routinely say pretty chilling things on that matter these days.
Even if that doesn't happen, it seems quite likely that, once Trump is back in the White House, he will both permanently entrench far-right rule within the USA, and completely withdraw the US military and other ways to project power from both Europe and the West Pacific/East Asia region. Which would then allow Russia to conquer Europe, and China to conquer Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Afterwards, the BJP might follow in Trump's footsteps and permanently entrench far-right rule in India. Finally, whatever more or less democratic governments remain in other parts of the world would be either gobbled up by one or more of the big three or big four, or pressured into adapting more authoritarian power structures, and that would be that.
And once such a global alliance against authoritarian regimes has been established, I can easily see it lasting for hundreds or even thousands of years. Any rebellion against its rule would have to
start somewhere, and whenever such a rebellion would start somewhere, it could be easily identified, isolated, and destroyed.
In earlier posts, zompist pointed to examples of various states of affairs in the past that also seemed like they might last forever, but nevertheless ended soon. Thing is, there's simply no precedent for a truly globe-spanning authoritarian alliance with full access to the technology, especially in communication and transportation, of the 21st century. So we can't simply predict how stable or instable such a system would be by looking at the past.
In a dark irony, in that future, it might happen that in those parts of the world that end up ruled by far-right white supremacist regimes, official propaganda will tell people that democracy is discredited because of its association with trying to respect the rights of PoCs, and in most
other parts of the world, official propaganda will tell people that democracy is discredited because of its association with white supremacy.
Now, to some of zompist's old objections:
zompist wrote: ↑Sun May 01, 2022 4:01 am
Great powers don't really like each other. If it weren't for the US, would Putin and Xi be buddies?
In my scenario, a far-right US would stay around. In any case, I assume that the new rulers, as stupid as they might be about everything else, would still be smart enough to understand the importance of cooperating with each other on smashing any kind of democracy if it should appear anywhere. They might also have written or unwritten agreements with each other saying that, no matter how intense their rivalries get, they will never ever support proxy governments or movements that run or advocate for 20th century style democracy.
There doesn't seem to be much appetite these days for global interventions.
Oh, in Russia and China, there seems to be.
(For whatever reason, that includes Trumpism.)
I'd say in the case of Trumpism, it's mainly a combination of three factors:
1) While Trump himself is not exactly smart, he seems to have a good instinctive understanding of how "popular" the kind of wars in which a lot of US soldiers die usually are among the US general public.
2) The rise of Trump allowed the remaining old paleocons and their alt-right successors to move from the margins to the center of the GOP.
3) As a result of 1) and 2), even some people who had been gung-ho warmongers during the Bush years figured out which way the wind was blowing and erased their previous positions from their memories.
Your nightmare scenario would also require Europe to go full reactionary. I mean... you realize that you have 447 million people, a GNP of $16 trillion, and you're on top of the world technologically (along with the US and Japan)? That absolutely dwarfs (say) Russia, and who else is going to pick on you?
First of all, while population and GDP can be important factors in warfare, on their own, they don't wage war. Military equipment and military structures do.
Second, there isn't really a single political structure with those 447 million people and a GNP of $16 trillion. There's a lot of smaller countries, each a good deal smaller than Russia by population, which Russia might well gobble up one by one.
Third, there's internal matters: in most EU countries, the far right and the far left
both seem to be pro-Putin, with only those in between opposing him - and the center can't hold forever.
I don't think it's exactly optimistic to suggest that reactionaries can fail like Hitler failed. WWII was pretty destructive.
Hitler didn't have nukes. His suicide was less than three months before the first nuclear weapons test. If he would have had nukes, things would certainly have taken a
much darker turn back then.
But these bad boys achieve power by the same means they lose it: overwhelming personal ambition that takes advice from no one. They're not playing 14-dimensional chess.
They don't have to play 14-dimensional chess. People who've dedicated themselves to intellectual pursuits can all too easily forget just how effective simple brute force can be. Yes, dictators usually lose contact with reality, because people can't tell them the truth, but sufficiently brutal repression can often
insulate the powerful from reality.
I'll finish with a paraphrase of a well-known movie quote:
As I see it, the Chinese and Russian governments, and the USA's own far right, are out there. They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until all traces of political and intellectual freedom anywhere in the world are dead.