Reject the future, retreat into the past

Fundamentalism yields fascism, but generational turnover provides hope.

Generated by Anh T. Dang

When you think and advocate in grand strategic terms (and no, I’m not thinking of the academic realm with its fixation on the immutable laws of great/super power relationships), your favorite, go-to emotion must be anticipation. You can’t summon action merely through analysis and vision. As a book author I wish you could, but you can’t.

That takes time, meaning you will spend years arguing for a perspective that will come into being much later in your life. This is not a business for near-term gratification.

That perspective has to become painfully obvious — this trajectory you describe — to the vast bulk of your audience. It has to become inescapable.

We stand at that hinge of history regarding climate change. And, like most big change dynamics, there is a lot of resistance to the emerging reality.

Part of it is the rejection of guilt: I didn’t do that, somebody else must have.

Part of it is the balm of mortality: I wont’ be around for this, so I don’t care.

Both of those reactions carry with them a strong generational bias that is entirely self-reinforcing: You’re making all this up! This is complete nonsense! You can’t make me do this!

To a large extent, that is the Boomer/Xer leadership response. Faced with the greatest environmental challenge in human history, they expertly focus their attention on the suddenly astronomical threats of gender-affirming therapies and pedophiles.

Who knew this existential culture war would arrive just as climate change gets undeniable!

Why such mania? Weak and unpopular targets, cheap wins, complete distraction. When you don’t want to address the giant iceberg right off your bow, you grab the closest deck chairs and get busy rearranging them!

The rejectionists also reframe the issue: It’s not climate change, it’s all those migrants at the border that is the real threat! THIS IS AN INVASION!

The desperation to avoid the looming reality is palpable and is best captured, in many ways, by White Christian Nationalism, which, when you think of the term, is almost a perfect this-far-and-no-farther declaration. It is a fright-filled admission of the outcomes set in motion:

America will stop being a White-centric culture.

America will stop being a Christian-dominant culture.

America the nation is being remade by all these changes.

All three of those things are happening, triggered first by globalization (US-style) and then closely followed by demographic aging and climate change — the inescapable trinity of the 21st century. We are growing far more diverse as a nation, and that change displaces both Whites and Christianity from their dominant, privileged existences within our culture and nation. I don’t fear that but many do, and those that do typically want to preserve exclusivity and homogeneity, because they believe that to be natural, or, more pointedly, God’s way (We were chosen, you were not).

That’s just human nature: the need to sanctify ambition — even greed, while justifying a lack of empathy (They deserve this because they are not true believers). Everybody wants to get ahead and will engage in whatever rationalizations are necessary.

Still, when confronted with the reality that this is a world first and foremost of America’s creation, much of the rejection choir grows only more vehement: Then we can change it back!

And once you reach that point in logic, the embrace of fundamentalism is assured. You no longer want to live in this world, or the one that’s coming into being. You want to retreat into the golden past, stop (or control) all technological advance, and repair yourself in that lost environment (now forcibly achieved, if necessary).

As such, fundamentalism goes hand in hand with fascism: the need to control the whole of society (getting inside citizens’ bodies and minds, whenever possible) so as to enforce the embrace of humanity’s sole path to happiness.

That is the core question that begins all political science: Is humanity’s progress (toward happiness) singular or varied in execution?

[NOTE: singular path = authoritarianism/dictatorship, varied paths = pluralism/democracy.]

If there is only one acceptable version of happiness, and you are empowered with that knowledge, then it is incumbent upon you to take control and force that trajectory — no matter the cost suffered or pain inflicted on others. It is your duty. And, because God is naturally on your side in this quest, it is your sacred duty to combat this evil in all its forms.

It’s either you or them who’s going to Hell, so, of course, compromise is anathema.

This is essentially the Gordian Knot that compelled me to write America’s New Map. We are stuck in an OODA Loop of threat-fear reactions, primarily among our older generations but increasingly infecting our young as well. Every observation is self-reinforcing. Our orientation thus warped, our decisions are reflexive and without thought. Our actions are even worse: violent releases of pent-up anxiety that further reduce our powers of observation.

Keep rinsing and repeating and pretty soon you are living in a world of chaos, threats, and evil, with your only chance at understanding coming in the hidden subtext of conspiracies: Somebody is engineering all of this!

[At this point in his rant, Tom, who had started this post to examine the woes of the insurance industry regarding extreme weather, realizes he has replicated some of the going-down-the-drain dynamic that he meant only to touch upon as an intro to his sober and pragmatic analysis. What to do? Pivot generationally. That’s the only way out of this mess!]

All that is to give you a sense of why I chose to cast America’s New Map in generational terms.

Now, a rewind back to my 2009 book, Great Powers, just to prove my point about anticipation (patience) being a key attribute of strategic thinking:

In my opinion, the Boomer generation represents one of the weakest cohorts of politicians America has ever produced. Like most revolutionary generations, the Boomers were frustrated by the lack of the political change they effected in their youth, so the bulk of their talent and ambition thereupon went into the private sector. Thwarted on the political front, they turn to the far less restricted domains of business and technology in an attempt to change their world from another angle. The result is typically a huge burst of creativity and entrepreneurship. We saw this in Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848, in the United States following the Civil War, and in today’s China after Tiananmen Square. The serious talent simply skips a political process it considers “low” and “demeaning” and instead chooses the real “business” of social and economic progress, believing that “what’s good for my company/jndustry is good for my country!” If I were to compare the Boomers as a political generation to one from America’s past, it would be to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, or roughly from 1870 to 1900. The reason why that comparison will strike so many of you as obscure is that most Americans can’t name any presidents or prominent politicians from that age, but know well the industrial titans such as Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Decades from now the key names most Americans will remember from our age will be Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Rupert Murdoch (yes, he’s a Yank now, too), while virtually all our politicians will slip into well-deserved obscurity.

The Boomers were essential to the rise of globalization. They invented so much of its connectivity. They revolutionized human society and the global economy. But they have been a complete disaster on politics. In their self-absorption, they have spent their decades (1992 onward) of political rule laser-focused on meaningless culture wars designed to extend/reverse the social and civil progress of the 1960s and 1970s in an quixotic effort to — as both Clinton and Trump put it (stealing from Reagan) — make America great again, a pathetic turning-back-the-clock effort that has effectively sidelined America at a moment in human history when we are called upon — more than any of nation — to meet this interwoven cluster of world-reshaping challenges (demographics, climate, global middle class).

Now we are saddled with infirm political leadership suffering a sort of strategic Alzheimer’s (The world is changing too fast, let me off!). Our youth are increasingly dismayed by this lack of action, vision — whatever you want to call it. With the Boomers (and most of Gen X), the sad truth is that there is no there, there. Politics has become a complete waste of time.

This, of course, is very dangerous for a democracy.

And yet, there is both hope and danger to be spotted in this situation. Back to Great Powers, picking up the text where I left off above:

That may seem a harsh judgment, but let me explain why I think it’s so crucial for America’s grand strategy going forward that we as a nation move beyond the political rule of the Boomers. Morris Massey, an expert on conflict between generations, pioneered the argument that states, “What you are is where you were when …,” meaning all of us reach a point in life where we discover a world larger than ourselves. At that juncture, we become cognizant of the morals we’ve developed across our early years, and those morals — or worldview — tend to persist across our adult years. For most people, that fateful transition occurs n the teenage years, which explains our tendency to stick with the popular music of those years throughout adulthood. Admit it. You stayed cool enough across your twenties and maybe you faked it deep into your thirties, but then you woke up in the your forties and realized you absolutely hated your kids’ music! It happens to everyone.

So Massey’s basic point is that our worldview is essentially formed by the time we hit college. Everything that came before it is considered normal, and much of what comes after is viewed as just plain weird. Given enough grounding by parents and religion, most people hold on to their “normal” as they grow older, taking in stride the increasingly “weird,” but eventually succumbing to nostalgia for the “good old days.” One trick I’ve learned as a foreign policy strategist is that whenever I encounter somebody with a clear position on something, I simply check how that issue was playing out back when this person was a teenager. It usually matches up quite well.

An example of how this works: Boomers and Xers, being Cold War babies, will always view Russia and China as existential threats that demand containment and justify aggressive preparations for World War III. Google a bit and you will find they are obsessed with, and trapped within, this mindset.

An example of the break between generations: How younger ones are sympathetic now to Palestinians while older ones are firm in their support for Israel. Why? Across my youth Israel was totally heroic while Palestinians were totally terroristic. Boomers and Millennials simply grew up with vastly different versions of that enduring conflict, and once inculcated, these worldviews stick.

So, back to my logic in writing the book: I don’t think it is possible to change the minds of Boomers and Xers on climate change and the rest. They are essential lost souls trapped in the worldview of the late 1960s and early 1970s — endlessly replaying that societal struggle. The same is true of the Cold War fundamentalists: they cannot imagine, for the life of them, a different world.

Our current leadership generations will never adequately deliver on climate change (though I must credit Biden with the most effort to-date bar none, even as it is woefully insufficient to both the challenge and the economic opportunity [!] afforded by climate change).

So then you look to the future, specifically to upcoming leadership generations who grew up as climate change natives, Whites-as-majority-minority natives, and global-middle-class natives (and yes, a haircut in expectations comes with that), understand — and take solace in the fact that — this is the only world they’ve known, and it’s one where climate change is pervasive and undeniable and capable of mobilizing their political activism.

So I say to them, run as hard as you can with your anger and disappointment in your leaders.

Don’t take no for an answer.

Act up and disrupt and force change.

You are presently humanity’s best hope.