When I used to be on Twitter, around this time of year I would, like everyone else, participate in the annual summing up of an arbitrary 365-day slice of history, and/or sharing hopes and predictions for the coming one. This one, from early 2020, is perhaps typical of the genre (and, I guess, eerily prescient, given that I was not, at the time, in any way focused on the reports of a weird new coronavirus recently discovered in China):
This ritual took on somewhat more urgency at the end of 2020, when, to put it mildly, everyone had a bad year. And then 2021 started with an attempted coup which was somehow both genuinely frightening and kind of pathetic, and 2022 brought a war, and now we’ve got another war on top of that, and a whole bestiary of other terrors.
2024 will, of course, be a presidential election year. For the first twenty years of my adult life, the presidency was held alternately by Bushes and Clintons, and for a while in 2008 it looked like that situation could easily be extended another eight years, the black cats and white cats we mice are allowed to vote for having resolved themselves into two competing dynasties.
Instead we got Obama, who fused the neoliberalism of the Clintons with the neoconservatism of the Bushes, delivering bailouts to Wall Street and the Big Three auto companies and making the permanent war of drones and someone else’s childrens’ boots on the ground palatable to the brunch crowd. The Democrats were not successful in becoming a “mass party of the center” — but they were successful, during the Obama years, in shedding what last vestiges they may have had of being a party of the working class, or a party of peace, or — it turns out — a party with a committed mass base.
Poetry teaches us that “the centre cannot hold” — and the 2016 election, which was supposed to consolidate the Bush-Clinton-Obama legacy by crowning another Clinton president, became instead a time of monsters for the West Wing class, who were at least as frightened of Bernie Sanders’ challenge from the left as they were of Trump.
Now, after four years of nightmarish hooliganism and four years of sleepwalking anemia, the best that our political establishment has to offer us is a sad re-run between two men each over three-quarters of a century old, not the scions of the dynasties that ruled us for almost three decades but their confused and belligerent old uncles. First as tragedy, then as farce indeed.
The year before I headed off to college, the most-played song on college radio in the U.S. was an awful anthem called “Right Here, Right Now,” a paean to the collapse of what used to be called “actually existing socialism” in Eastern Europe. It took a potshot at Tracy Chapman and treated Bob Dylan as a has-been and exulted in “watching the world wake up from history.”
History, to the capitalist triumphalists, was something to celebrate the end of. There was no other place Jesus Jones’s singer wanted to be but also there was no other place he could be; history had ended, change was no longer possible, we would live from now on in an endless present.
Five years later, in 1996, after I had graduated with a degree in history, the young folk singer Ani DiFranco released an album of instrumental music overlaid with recordings of the much older folk singer Utah Phillips’ between-song stage patter. The album took its title from the following observation of his:
I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know, and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.
William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, when history seemed to many to have taken a decided turn for the worse.
The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, observing the same period, had a similarly dark take on the moment when he wrote “now is the time of monsters.” Yet beneath the sands he saw a different engine: not a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, but a new world struggling to be born as the old world was dying.
We are of course all living through history, all the time, and making it. But at the same time our actions and experiences are like Schrödinger’s cat, half dead and meaningless and half alive and pivotal and we know not which until the history is written. And once it is written, unlike a subatomic particle, the valences of particular moments in history remain infinitely contestable.
In August 1991, as I was packing my bags for college, a group of “hard-liners” in the Soviet Union engineered an ill-advised coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup failed and by the end of the year the USSR had dissolved and the drunken buffoon Boris Yeltsin, widely hailed in the West as a “reformer,” had inherited its nuclear arsenal. Eight years later, Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin as his successor and the rest, as they say, is history.
I tend to be skeptical of “ours is the first era...” type arguments, or that we can even truly understand how people in the past perceived their own motion through history. Still, it’s hard not to think that their subjective experience was vastly different from ours. The acceleration from daily newspapers to the 24-hour news cycle of cable television (still a new development in my adolescence) to the endless barrage of social media does feel like something new, and it surely must play a role in the well-established link between social media usage and poor mental health. Nothing changes and everything is continually transformed, everything is at stake and nothing is winnable, we are responsible for the world but can barely rouse our slow and exhausted bodies from the ever-widening whirlpool of constantly churning dread.
Nonetheless, 2024 is coming whether we like it or not. We cannot unrock the cradle, all we can do is try not to be immobilized by despair, and do our best to wake up into history.