The day began with a cry of distress from Rebecca Solnit, my anchor for hope in dark times. The United States is being murdered, she writes, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.
Solnit is the prophet of slow, incremental change (I've just ordered her newest book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change), a steady reminder that through small victories and persistence the world has changed dramatically for the better in recent decades. But to be reminded by her of the savage efficiency of the nihilist destruction being wreaked on us was, to put it mildly, sobering. Am I imagining it or does she look older in little profile photo in the Guardian, too?
Still, Solnit is Solnit, and after a few paragraphs of doom-scrolling she pivots. While we struggle to make sense of what and who could be so maliciously destructive, the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
Reconstruction is coming. And by the day's end, the world resounded to the first big crack in the edifice of the destroyers. Hungarians voted out the poster boy for "illiberal" democracy, Victor Orban, having realized that his asseverations of "Christian civilization" were really just cloaks for kleptocracy, cronyism and xenophobia. The Orban-trained will have felt this too, and will be the more dangerously desperate in their efforts to subvert our upcoming elections. But for now, relish the thought that Hungary, which has shown autocrats how to hollow out a democracy, will now show the rest of us how to reconstruct it.
