Henry Wismayer

To argue that many of Trump’s acolytes were drawn to him because they saw him as a standard-bearer for losers is not to dismiss their grievances out of hand. Many, or perhaps most, of those stubbornly cleaving to the Trump flag are just ordinary pissed-off Joes, susceptible to the exhortations of anyone offering simple, snake-oil scapegoats to explain away the complex origins of their precarity, their depression, their fury at the state of the world. But it is all too tempting to speculate that many of Trump’s most vociferous supporters — the ones who engage and propagandize, who hitch themselves to his toxic politics come what may — emit the whiff of loserdom. In Trump, they see themselves reflected: the outcast whose social approbation somehow doesn’t measure up to their self-regard.

What lessons should be gleaned from this apparent relapse? Well, it shows us a few things that, in the naivety of the post–Cold War age, seemed to have been all too often overlooked. It reminds us that facts are not always able to countervail tribal instincts, and that the mere prospect of losing entrenched privileges is enough to drive a critical mass of a population into an abyss of self-destruction. It suggests that the shadow of enormous human suffering has a shelf life; that the concept of steady, inexorable social evolution is a lie. It shows us that Fukuyama was wrong.

“Within three days of the initial attack,” Schlosser writes, “the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 of China’s population — roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure…Once the SIOP was set in motion, it could not be altered, slowed, or stopped.”

Whether we liked it or not, the idea of liberalism’s irreversible victory had permeated our lives, delineating our sense of who we were and our place in the world. To scroll through the sputtering disbelief of #TheResistance today is to witness the consternation of people who thought we owned the future. Instead, complacent liberals like myself have been confronted by the revelation that a foundational assumption of our worldview might be a sham. Perhaps the three decades since the collapse of communism — which span the majority of my life — were not, as Fukuyama prophesied, an “end” signaling the irreversible victory of capitalism and liberalism. Perhaps they marked a hiatus, a temporary anomaly — a droplet of reason in an ocean of compulsion and emotional determinism.

And I’ll be candid with you, dear reader: I still can’t quite believe it, frankly, this overturning of the world we thought we knew. There is incredulity everywhere, but my sense is that it’s especially pointed among my generation. I am white, mid-30s, the product of a middle-class Western upbringing and education. Sager observers may have had cause for circumspection. “As historians might wish to remind metaphysical speculators about ‘The End of History,’ there will be a future,” wrote the great 20th-century chronicler Eric Hobsbawm in 1993. But for me and many others, the liberal consensus felt unassailable.

…Due to arrive on Wednesday, it was Friday — and several trips up and down the Port Bell road on various boda-boda motorcycle taxis — before an idle dock-worker pointed me in the direction of the 300-foot…

…, on earth, are heading, I’m not stressing about it. There’s an old saying: “What will be will be.” Stress and worry are not going to change or help anything. We just have to do the best we are able in the madness. And, maybe a group of us can do things that will affect or change the projection. There is a reason…

But there is a difference between these oracles, with their messages relayed from vengeful gods, and those ringing alarm bells today. Instead of being divined from spilled entrails and crystal balls, pessimism about the future has become the position of objective reason. The person who recently wrote that “we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity” wasn’t a swivel-eyed guy with a sandwich board. It was Steven fucking Hawking.

More recently, in the wake of the 2008 crash, as the tax-avoiding millionaires doubled their wealth while banks asked for bail-outs from the public purse, the sick underbelly of neoliberalism was exposed. For right-wing populists seeking a unifying enemy, this presented an opportunity to blur the lines between the two types of liberalism as part of a concerted project to demonize the status quo. By virtue of having the same label, social and economic liberalism became a single entity. Suddenly, the left could be blamed for the damage wrought by a right-wing agenda, with establishment figures like Hillary Clinton portrayed as architects (rather than the inheritors) of an unforgivable betrayal.

It is imperative that you recognize that there is no basis for reasoning with a white nationalist. There is no basis for listening to someone who indicates in any way that they believe groups of Ame…