Everyone Knows It's the End of the World
And that it's the other side's fault.
Here’s a funny thing about 2024. Conservatives and liberals are both sure that America is headed for disaster, but for totally different reasons. And of course, they each blame each other.
On the Left (which probably includes you, dear reader), we’re worried about a cluster of interrelated issues, including climate disaster, anti-democratic nationalism in the US and abroad, war, persistent xenophobia, and perhaps economic and ecological collapse as well.
On the Right, there is an equally dismal sense of foreboding, but for reasons that most progressives dismiss, including the loss of American identity (because of immigration, multiculturalism, wokeness, and America-hating elites), the decline in religion and traditional morality, the threat of socialism and loss of freedom, and rising crime and social disorder, among others.
We’re united by the sense of doom, while completely opposed on the reasons why.
Interestingly, when it comes to the actual end of the world, most professional futurists have entirely different set of concerns from both the Left and the Right. The Effective-Altruism-adjacent organization 80,000 Hours, which attempts to quantify existential risks (i.e. risks of human extinction) and what can be done to mitigate them, lists the the top risks as AI, pandemics, nuclear war, a war between great global powers, and cataclysmic climate change. With the exception of climate, those five don’t show up on either the Right or the Left’s laundry lists.
As a longtime political pundit on the one hand and scholar of apocalyptic and messianic movements on the other, I don’t know how to assess this widespread sense of doom. On the one hand, for all of civilization, it has always been five minutes to midnight. Human beings appear to be wired for doomsaying – perhaps because, for all of us individually, the world is indeed going to end, or perhaps because it’s evolutionarily useful to worry too much rather than too little, what positive psychologists call “negativity bias.” The end of the world has been predicted to take place in 66, 96, 345, 500, 1000, 1300, 1346, 1492, 1524, 1648, 1666, 1784, 1792, 1843, 1914, 1945, 1967, 1975, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2012, 2027, and (checks IPCC reports), 2045.
On the other hand, while the end of the world may always be nigh, it seems especially nigh nowadays. And even if civilization doesn’t end, things can still get pretty bad.
Another index of Armageddon, the Doomsday Clock — created in 1945 by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and other characters in this year’s Oscar favorite — now reads 90 seconds to midnight. “Ominous trends continue to point the world toward global catastrophe,” reads the 2024 statement. “The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia, and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernize their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation.”
But wait, there’s more: “In 2023, Earth experienced its hottest year on record, and massive floods, wildfires, and other climate-related disasters affected millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, rapid and worrisome developments in the life sciences and other disruptive technologies [the statement later discusses A.I.] accelerated, while governments made only feeble efforts to control them.”
Once again, like the 80,000 hours X-Risk list, the Doomsday Clock doesn’t even count the things that keep liberals or conservatives up at night, which perhaps points to the gap between rational risk assessment and emotional risk perception. But it does capture the widespread sense that not only are bad things happening, but that — despite the very real advances in medicine, life expectancy, the reduction in poverty, and the overall rise in standard of living — life as we know it may radically change for the worse.
Moreover, the intensity of our disagreement as to the causes of the crisis is, itself, a primary ingredient in the crisis. The republic is breaking and the guardrails are failing: we don’t trust one another. We seem as far apart as ever, and in danger of things falling apart.
This is a felt sense, not an intellectual one. I know it is for me. I watched the trailer for the new Alex Garland film Civil War and had an anxiety response. Leave the World Behind too. I watched a hilarious parody of a Trumpist goading liberals to take his guns, but before the parody kicked in, I was terrified. At times, denial is the only viable coping mechanism.
I don’t want to both-sides the end of the world, because I don’t think the factual grounds of the Right’s and the Left’s terror are equivalent. There are facts. Immigrants are not actually overwhelming America, even if the current system is broken (thanks to Trump’s tanking of the recent bipartisan deal) and illegal/undocumented immigration is spiraling right now. While traditional religious structures are in decline, I would argue that more Americans have more freedom because of that “decline.” Certainly that’s true for me.
There are also facts when it comes to American history. Slavery is a historical fact. The genocide of Native Americans is a historical fact. Right-wing patriots may not like when these facts are raised, and, who knows, maybe they’re right that dwelling on the horrors of American history makes it hard to build bonds of civic pride today. But it’s preposterous to claim that facing these facts is un-American or propaganda or “woke” or whatever label they want to put on it. It’s a fulfillment of the best American aspirations to recognize how far they have been from reality.
Likewise, the increasing diversity of America is an embodiment of those values, not a decline. There is no time America was “greater” than now, because for all our great failings, there is still more opportunity now for more Americans than ever before. And we have a long way left to go.
And yet, whatever the factual asymmetries, what is symmetrical is the sense of collapse, the affective experience of disorder.
And of course the Trump phenomenon is a response to this. He expresses and validates the primal rage of the Christian-dominated, white-dominated, male-dominated American patriarchy that knows itself to be in decline. No one in his base gives a crap about his misdeeds, miscues, and misstatements. They are mad as hell, and so is he, and that’s all that matters. Whether it’s Christian Nationalists regarding him as God’s chosen one, or “patriots” who see him as one of their own, Trump’s base – still a minority of the American people, thankfully – sees him as America’s last hope.
What progressives fear about climate change and fascism, populists fear about America’s “decline”: the end of the world as we know it. And, I have argued, both sides engage in catastrophizing unmoored from fact – including on climate change.
So of course Trump won the primary in a landslide. There’s no candidate on either side of the aisle who speaks to these profound, primal, emotional fears, and fear is as great a motivator as hope. It’s no wonder that his base’s actual demands are a hodge-podge of conspiratorial nonsense and clickbait; it’s the rage, stupid, not the details. We’ll see, once the Biden campaign begins in earnest, if liberal fears about democracy imperiled are as potent as conservative fears about American decline – or if hope, somehow, can play a role as well.
If there’s a broken record to my political posts here on Both/And, it’s that liberals, especially, seem to repeatedly underplay the emotional and spiritual stakes of politics. They act as though most Americans understand and give a fuck about policy, facts, and figures, despite a century of contrary evidence. This is not so. Most Americans care about trusting their leaders, about a fundamental sense of safety and shared values, and about kitchen sink issues like basic economic wellbeing – which, for all Biden’s clear successes regarding the economy, most Americans experience less and less these days. It’s the spiritual politics, smartie.
Look in the mirror. Can you allow yourself to feel the dread of a climate-changed future in which a billion refugees destroy the world order and bring about a wave of extreme nationalisms around the globe? Can you feel the rage at the plutocrats, theocrats, and rabble-rousers who have brought us to this point? Can you allow yourself to believe that your political adversary feels the same dread, the same fear, and the same rage about you?
I really did love the AI’s work this week. Is it disturbing that it does its best image generations when the prompts include words like “Doomsday”?
If you’re in the NYC area, hey, come check out my concert this Saturday night March 9 with Kleztronica. I’ll be performing excerpts from my book of short stories alongside sick beats and live music. Say hello! I’ll also soon be headed to the Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival in New Orleans, where I’ll be reading and teaching a bit.
And while I didn’t write about Israel/Palestine this week, I did teach about it at three (!) institutions of higher learning. Still praying for a bilateral ceasefire and an end to the pain.
It's easy for me to understand "the other side" because I live in a rural part of a red state, where Democrats are scarce on the ground. The Other Side tells me exactly what they think. One person told me that she's a Republican "because of black people." It doesn't get much clearer than that, but weirdly, at first I was confused. Eventually I figured out she meant, "Because I don't like black people and Democrats do."
When Obama was first running for President, my neighbors told me that Obama was a "Mohammed" and a Marxist, and that he would turn off the electric power if elected. When I offered to fact-check that online, my neighbor said I didn't need to, because she was going to believe whatever the people at her church said, regardless of its factuality. She also told me that school children in California were forced to take Muslim names and perform Muslim rituals at school.
During the pandemic, my neighbors told me that Covid was a hoax invented "to keep people from working." It was not clear why "they" wanted to keep people from working. I guess because "they" are bad.
During the 2020 election year, I interviewed some Q-Anon people in my town. I asked them why they were demonstrating in front of the Goodwill Store. (Yes, that is their preferred site.) They said because they had to save America. When I asked from what, their leader came over and shoo'ed me away. So I never found out who or what was going to take America away from them. But I can guess.
In the last five years, the amount of gunfire in my neighborhood has increased dramatically. Men go out in their backyards and fire away at paper targets on pieces of plywood, for an hour or two, in the afternoon on nice days. One guy evidently has a bump stock because he sounds as if he's shooting a machine gun. In light of this, I have just stopped talking about politics altogether with my neighbors. I don't ask and I don't tell. I do have a Biden sticker on the truck I take to the dump, but that is all. My neighbor's bedraggled 2020 Trump sign is still in her front yard.
Stay safe, y'all.
Wow! Thank you for this piece and all your links. We need more voices like yours.