by ERNESTO AGUILAR
One of the Left’s great challenges is to understand when the great watershed of change is upon people and seize the time. Racism, sexism, inequality, and uncertain futures have weighed heavily on the conscience of many a movement. For every great moment, hundreds of crushing defeats never to be remembered are handed down. Once in a rare moon, stunning defeats like the 1965 Selma to Montgomery demonstrations or the Long March galvanize participants and become iconic — something history recalls as a moral victory that alters the fates of those involved. But how often does that happen? It’s much more seldom than you’d think.
The expectation of sure and monumental societal shifts is not isolated to progressives. The Right has more than its share of individuals who believe in the surety of change. In some alternate, albeit anecdotal, universe, Left and Right, extreme flavors in particular, share a view that society, whether through greed, excess, loss of the moral barometer, or any number of factors, has lost its way and its people need to wake up to that reality. In some cases, these subcultures of doom can shake people from slumber and even influence their outcomes. No one will probably ever know how much blood committed people have spilled for the sake of change, either to spark it or stop it.
In Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (PM Press, 2012), James Davis, Sasha Lilley, David McNally, and Eddie Yuen in four essays beautifully plumb the history of these hopes, even mad ones. Part history lesson, part ideological soul searching, Catastrophism is a dense yet enthralling attempt to not only understand what brings Left and Right to believe in the inevitability of renewal, but also to take apart these visions in hopes of educating readers about what true social change means and why nothing can truly replace mass grassroots organizing.
It is not hard to figure out where even well-adjusted people adopt the idea of the certainty of social collapse. Generations upon generations of popular culture has normalized the notion that the world is folding and that it is now on the shoulders of a few brave souls to battle for the future. It’s not just the wildly popular Christian Left Behind series to latch onto this storyline. You’d be hard pressed to not find in the cultural landscape images of a dying world, which is a plot device in so many books, films, and television serials. McNally reminds readers that horrific imagery has been for years a harbinger of public sentiment, especially a metaphor for what people fear most. With Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero famously tapped into the zombie for a cultural criticism of capitalism as inherently cannibalistic. The monsters of modern film seem numbingly banal, with their assorted social awkwardness, relationship problems, and lusts, and yet they still play the same cultural functions as classic monsters like vampires. The average American is plunged each day into this world where conflict, death, and chaos are at every turn; Hollywood has merely found a way to profit. The make-believe world, McNally says, masks real worries of neoliberalism, austerity, and similar horrors which now rule our daily lives.
Themes of fictional wars against the undead pock our imaginations and, increasingly, the political intelligence of the public. The far right, as Davis investigates, has been virtually sculpted by beliefs in social apocalypse for nearly a century or more. As the first Roman Catholic presidential nominee, Al Smith’s losing bid for president in 1928 is widely credited by historians to be in part due to worries of conservative Christians that the White House would be controlled by the Pope. Later, Minister Arno C. Gaebelein fought the New Deal, believing it was a cover for Russian Communism and, under that, Satan himself aiming to make all people his loyal servants. Such ideas have endured to this very day, where the Pat Buchanans and Billy Grahams of the scene see the specter of one world government poised to vanquish traditional Christianity at any moment. The Obama Administration has been a popular target for a spectrum of conservatives, from disgraced pundit Dinesh D’Souza to Texas conspiracy guru Alex Jones, as the iron first ready to seize true Americans’ freedoms. With such storm troopers apt to destroy life as we know it, ideologies like dominionism, which holds that natural resources were offered to humanity by God for its use and their exhaustion will hasten Christ’s return, find a large and influential audience. Farfetched as they sound, such concepts on the Right are plentiful.
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