It's Tacky To Say 'I Told You So': An Ode To Collapse And What To Do About It

Are things that bad? Yes. Obviously. But neither ignoring nor dwelling on it is a way forward.

Honestly, I didn’t. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I don’t keep a list of prominent people who’ve said stupid things about the political concerns of the day because there aren’t enough reams of A4 or zeroes and ones in the galaxy. Likewise, I try not to dwell on those who for the last decade or so have defaulted to “That won’t/can’t happen” and dismissed those of us who’ve warned that the bad days were here as chicken littles. One can be forgiven for being in shock in 2016, but long before 2026, there were no excuses left. The United States had long before entered terminal decline, imperial decay at scale, led by an authoritarian and beyond the point at which those hallowed “institutions,” whatever they may be, would rise to the occasion.

We knew that Canada wouldn’t, couldn’t, be a passive observer at distance, spared from damage, collateral or direct. But humans are good at wishful thinking and self-delusion, especially those who have no understanding or appreciation of history. Still, that’s no excuse. America is a place where everything and anything that could happen had already happened, or nearly so. Violence, institutional decay, authoritarianism, and imperial folly might have clashed with the sanitized mythical conception of the country as the shining city on a hill, but only a rube could believe in such a fabrication in the first place.

That Trump won, eroded norms, shredded institutions (already in rough shape) tried to pull off a coup, won again, raised a force of brown shirts, declared trade war on the world, tore alliances apart, and threatened the sovereignty of a handful of states was just one after another of “Okay, well, surely no further” hopes dashed against the reality that things can and do go bad — very bad — all the time. The centre, whatever it may be, cannot hold and tends not to. If you read the stories that comprise human history for the past, say, two thousand years, nothing reads as surprising. Rooting your expectations in the decade of the 1990s is a bit like watching a single down of a football game and expecting to be able to predict the final score. It doesn’t work and it makes you look like an idiot.

By now, we need to accept that whatever might be thinkable trumps whatever might be unthinkable, which is to say the latter category has lost all use, if not all meaning. Ahead of the holidays, I overheard a conversation in a bookstore in which those present discussed whether they’d sign up to fight in a war between Canada and the U.S. or accept conscription. One fellow was particularly keen in a fashion that I ought not to repeat here. Let’s just say he’d sign on the dotted line and scurry right off to the armoury. How many of those conversations are taking place, casually or otherwise, throughout the country right now? Probably a lot more than were in 2015 or, for that matter, 2020. What might 2026 hold? Not less of that, I’ll bet.

It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but the trick to wrapping your head around chaos at scale is not to become numb to it or so cynical that you merely wave it off. Each is a defence mechanism and understandable, even permissible, in small doses. But over time, these responses serve to normalise and thus enable atrocious and destructive behaviour. That what’s happening in the U.S. and elsewhere is extraordinary (for us today) is not cause for us to get used to it.

The first step is accepting that it is indeed happening and that it could continue to happen, not to mention that it could get worse. The next step is asking yourself what you’re going to do about it in whatever small, medium, or large way you can, perhaps beginning within your own community such as by modelling a better way to co-exist with others, standing for office yourself, joining or starting a movement, or whatever. Even saying true things out loud among others and calling for us to recognize such things without accepting them as inevitable or the “new normal” is something. For those who spent years dismissing or trying to explain away the very real threats we face, they might wish to make particular amends, accepting their complicity, failure, and betrayal and joining the rest of us in reality. Everyone loves a comeback story.

The long, dark days of winter might not be the most inviting time to think about all of this but here we are. How does one resist the rise of authoritarianism? How do we do so individually and collectively? What can we do at home? Across borders? What are our own expectations, duties, and red lines? These are the questions we must ask. We’re well beyond “if” or “what if” and thoroughly into the territory of “What now?”

So, what now?