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May 20 - May 25, 2020
We see the same old men, again and again, vampires feeding on a nation and draining the lifeblood from words like “treason” and “trauma” and “tragedy.”
In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity.
To millionaire elites, many of whom already had an apocalyptic bent, a depopulated world is not a tragedy but an opportunity—
Trump’s reverence for Russia was framed as mere improper behavior instead of what it was: an ominous twist on a long dark-money trail.
For decades, Trump had relied on oligarchs and mobsters from the former USSR for support after Wall Street blacklisted him following his bankruptcies in the 1990s.
Once an autocrat gets into office, it is very hard to get them out. They will disregard term limits, they will purge the agencies that enforce accountability, they will rewrite the law so that they are no longer breaking it. They will take your money, they will steal your freedom, and if they are clever, they will eliminate any structural protections you had before the majority realizes the extent of the damage.
We have lost a lot over the last few years, but one of the most disorienting losses is our sense of time.
People ask me how I find hope. I answer that I don’t believe in hope, and I don’t believe in hopelessness. I believe in compassion and pragmatism, in doing what is right for its own sake. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy because hope is inextricable from time. An enduring strategy of autocrats is to simply run out the clock.
When a region loses both cultural representation and economic clout, it becomes easy for politicians to exploit the resentment of its residents, especially when that resentment stems not from envy but grief.
