dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Will the Coronavirus Unleash an American Version of the Revolutions of 1848?

The suspense builds as the November 2020 election nears, with some on both sides expecting a decisive resolution to the political crisis that first became obvious with the disputed Florida recount of 2000. “Though Gore came in second in the electoral vote, he received 547,398 more popular votes than Bush, making him the first person since Grover Cleveland in 1888 to win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College.” Ever since then, the U.S. has had a string of not-quite-acceptable presidents and two increasingly divergent narratives. Everyone wants to know how the showdown ends.

Over those 20 years, the correlation of forces has changed. In most big things the progressive agenda has been pushed back, gradually by the populist revolt of 2016, then more rapidly by the coronavirus pandemic. The ‘Davos’ brand of globalization has become too risky to continue unmodified. Supply chains have demonstrated extreme vulnerability. Cities, with their high-rise offices and mass transportation, have become unhealthy places to work in a pandemic. International travel is a pale shadow of its former self. The borderless world the elites strove to build has proved unsustainably fragile.

Yet while the progressives were losing the outside they were winning big on the inside, within institutions. They were dominating the “new rigidities.” Liberals in media and higher education outnumbered conservatives at ratios upwards of four to one. Even the bureaucracy and corporate boardroom the liberals dominated what has been called the Deep State, an unelected structure “made up of networks of power operating independently of a state’s political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.”

They balanced the loss in one with a gain in the other enabling the progressive cause to effectively employ online shaming tactics, otherwise known as “cancel culture,” to maintain its agenda. But this is unlikely to be decisive in the long term. The COVID-19 pandemic resembles a bigger version of the European potato failure which changed demography, altered political relations, and spurred European revolutions in the mid 19th century. Natural disasters not only cause their own devastation they accelerate underlying trends. After the potato famine, the Irish ruling elite was never the same again but that was the least of it. The subsistence failure of 1845 led to 1848, known as “the year of revolutions.”

The November election will likely not be a period but a comma. The old “normal” is not coming back. There will no sudden awakening to an alternative universe where Hillary won the 2016 election nor will it result in a “final defeat” of the progressive project with all the Marxism of the last century repealed.

Rather, what started 20 years ago might continue for decades more until a new normal is reached: a renegotiated consensus on what governance should be; whether a mechanism designed to redistribute power, resources, and legitimacy to preferred constituencies or an enabling network that will allow everyone to pursue truth and happiness; whether the Blue or the Red prevails or something in between.

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https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2020/07/13/beyond-november-2020-n631287