Remember Jane Jetson? Remember her perfect 60s hairdo and poodle skirt? How about her feminist consciousness? No, it’s unlikely you would remember that, because she didn’t have one. In the early 1960s, the guys writing cartoon shows didn’t imagine a future with feminism in it. They imagined a future with the same social norms but better technology.
In 2019, most of us envisioned the coming election with dueling rallies, demonstrations and campaign workers knocking on doors and hoped that all those efforts would produce a result like every election before with exultant winners and disappointed but resigned losers. We didn’t imagine an election in the midst of a worldwide pandemic in which many people chose political tribal loyalty over survival. Likewise, an unprovoked war of aggression with countless civilian atrocities in Central Europe wasn’t a possibility until it happened. Our world view didn’t account for the siege of Mariupol.
That’s why I strongly suspect that white Americans like me and my friends, with our livable incomes, stable residences, and relative freedom to live as we please simply have no idea of what is coming over the next several years. We have grown accustomed to living in a country where women don’t need to terminate unwanted pregnancies themselves and don’t face murder charges for deciding not to carry a fetus to term. Now we live in a country where this has happened and we can expect it to happen a lot more.
We didn’t live in a country where right wing fanatics staged a coup against to keep their favorite authoritarian in power, until we did. We didn’t live in a country where one major political party engaged in treason, until we did. We can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a country where one political party stays in power regardless of how the people vote but unless we all do a lot between now and next November, we soon will.
History tells us that one-party authoritarian rule makes most people’s lives worse, not better. It also tells us that one-party authoritarians handle the popular dissatisfaction by demonizing, persecuting and ultimately murdering large numbers of the citizens they identify as problem people. It’s political theater designed to keep people from concentrating on all the ways their lives are getting worse under the dictatorship. And because life always gets worse under dictatorships, the demonization and dehumanization of the scapegoats does too. In the end, it always escalates into ‘disappearances,’ ‘suicides in protective custody,’ and other euphemisms for widespread, state-sponsored murder. I don’t doubt that under similar circumstnces, the thing that always happens in other times and places would also happen in this time and place.
We can’t imagine a country where politically untouchable people in power grant Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and right wing police, license to hurt and kill Americans whose politics they don’t like. But that’s exactly what members of those groups were preparing to do on January 6th. Do we doubt that, given the opportunity to do that without consequences, they would try it again? Does anyone doubt that once Republican leaders able to stay power no matter how people vote, they will let them?
We still have time left to protect democracy, but no time left to pretend we don’t need to. The surest way to bring on the unspeakable is to think it won’t happen.