What Does Collapse Look Like?

Probably a lot like what we're seeing now. But we shouldn't give up.

This is why you need to stay on top of home maintenance. Source: Yoal Desurmont on Unsplash.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling that presidents have absolute immunity for “official acts,” whatever that means, got me thinking about balconies. For the longest time, sitting on a balcony, my thoughts would occasionally drift to what would happen if the thing just suddenly fell apart. (I’m a blast at parties.)

You’re sitting there, sipping coffee, looking out over the day. Then you hear a creak or a groan or whatever sound a balcony makes towards the end. And then you hear another. The next thing you know, you’re plummeting. It happens. Balconies do collapse. I can’t explain the engineering of the thing, or whether a reasonable person ought to be able to see it coming, but I know it happens.

Political collapse happens, too. Gradual, then sudden, like so many things. I think most reasonable people ought to be able to see that coming most of the time, like now. But to cut folks some slack, it’s hard to wrap your head around.

Acknowledging and understanding political collapse is hard because it requires us to break away from all the mythology and all our hopes — that things will be okay, that we’ll be safe, that maybe we’ll even thrive — and accept that there’s a problem. We need to think things we’ve been taught not to think. We don’t like to think bad thoughts and we don’t like to suffer pain, so we avoid thinking about this kind of stuff. It’s hard to blame us.

On top of the unpleasantness of chewing on a big ol’ bite of disaster, there’s the fact that most people aren’t political scientists or writers with long stretches of time to ruminate (most writers don’t have that time, either, as it happens). Instead, people are trying to get through the day: getting up, getting dressed, getting themselves and their kids fed, getting to work, getting all that work done, and getting to bed exhausted after an evening of scrolling. Not many are coming home from a long day and keen to think long and hard about political collapse. Why should they be?

For years, however, I’ve been thinking about and worrying about political collapse. It’s part of my job. I wrote about it in my book — which is still selling five years on and is more timely than when I wrote it, which is bad news. Back in 2018-2019, I was nervous about what was coming. Today I’m much more nervous, though a little numb.

A few years back, I was in Venice, Italy, researching Project Mose, a modular dam system that was launching to help protect the city from flooding. I was working on another book, this time about past and present disaster. I wrote a few chapters of it and a proposal and I was researching, among other things, pandemics when the winter and spring of 2020 rolled around. I abandoned the book. What do you even say? But things didn’t get better.

The hits keep coming. The decline and potential fall of U.S. democracy, always deeply flawed but something worse now, is reshaping the world already. We could deconstruct the last American century and the effects of global empire, and all the nastiness at home and abroad that came with it, but the disintegration of empire brings its own hell. That’s not an argument for preserving empire; it’s just a fact. Something better could emerge. But the time in between is, to say the least, likely to be unpleasant. For Canada, who knows what will happen. I don’t think we’ll be ready. I don’t think it will be a nice period.

I have no clue what the long run order of the world will look like, nor our living conditions under it. But in the short and medium term, the collapse and upheaval will be tremendously difficult to navigate. The return of a multi-polar world is already destabilizing global geopolitics (again, for better or worse long-term). The rise of American authoritarianism will further immiserate Americans and people around the world. Climate change will be a force multiplier for the worst effects of political decline while introducing its own terrible consequences. We’re not ready for that, and the suffering will be distributed inequitably, as it typically is.

I’m thinking about all of this because I’m worried about us hitting a tipping point that we can’t yet see. And I’m worried it could be closer than most of us expect. I genuinely don’t know for sure if/when that’ll happen, but I worry about it. I worry the moment will continue to creep up on us until one day it arrives and off to the races we go, unprepared, snake-bitten. That’s the moment the balcony collapses and we plummet, with barely a moment to think “Oh god, what’s happened?”

I don’t think it does much good to wallow in all of this, though. I mentioned that I’m a bit numb to it all, but I’m not a nihilist. I believe the things we do in response to what we face matter and that we ought to try however we can, in our own way, to struggle for justice — especially those of us in relative or absolute positions of comfort or security or abundance. I don’t think it’s productive or fair to default to going all Lord of the Flies. We might end up there, but it’s worth trying not to if we can manage it.

There’s a meaningful difference between bad and worse. If we accept that we ought to fight for something better, the central battle will be over deciding together what a response and better alternative order will look like and ensuring that it — that new balcony — is better constructed than the last one.