The Overlapping Crises Are Coming, Regardless of Who’s in Power
No leader can reverse the dynamics of mutually reinforcing crises.
Commentators seem split into three camps: those who see Trump as a manifestation of smouldering social/economic ills, those who see Trump and his supporters as the cause of those ills, and those who see Trump as both manifestation and cause of those ills.
I think this misses the point, which is the overlapping crises unfolding in this decade– diminishing returns on skyrocketing debts, the demographics of an aging populace, the erosion of the social contract and the profound disunity of political elites–will continue expanding and feeding on each other regardless of who is in power.
Historical analysis seems to swing between the “Big Man/Woman” narrative that views individuals as the drivers of history, and the “Big Forces/it’s all economics” narrative that sees individual leaders as secondary to the broad sweep of forces beyond the control of any individual or group.
So while the mainstream views President Lincoln as the linchpin of the Civil War–his election triggered the southern secession–from the “Big Forces/it’s all economics” view, Lincoln was no more than the match that lit a conflict that was made inevitable by forces larger than the 1860 election.
The tension between these two narratives is valuable, as history cannot be entirely reduced to individual decisions or broad forces (weather, resource depletion, financial crisis, geopolitical upheaval, demographics, plague, etc.). The dynamic interplay between the two shapes history.
Individuals do matter–but they cannot offset structural crises for long.
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