Even the losers get lucky sometimes

Without much prelude, this, my friends, is what we're facing.

And, as I said in this exchange, we're seeing it not only here in the United States, but the world over.

In France, Marine Le Pen is the favorite to be the next French president. In Germany, if the Christian Democrats win the upcoming elections and make a grand coalition with the Social Democrats, the neo-Nazi, Elon Musk-endorsed Alternativ fur Deutschland will be the official opposition, eighty years after the defeat of Hitler. In Spain, the far-right, Falangist-descended Vox was going to be brought into government by the center-right, Falangist-descended Partido Popular, until a bare majority of anti-fascist forces united to deny them the government.

What can you call the Taliban but losers? The mullahs in Iran? Islamists of all stripes and kinds? Small men who only feel powerful when they step on the rights of women?

In this country, Christian Nationalism is nothing but a catch-all for losers who feel their "Christian nation" slipping away. And our friends to the north might be electing their own version of Donald Trump at the next federal elections.

The world is changing at a clip which dwarfs the changes of other revolutionary eras: the American and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, the various revolutions of the 20th century. The Russian Revolution was seen as a cataclysmic event. So was that of Mao Zedong. What we're facing now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of the internet, the wrenching changes in lifestyles and morés and work patterns, puts those displacements into history's dustbin. We have no idea what the world will be like in five years, much less ten. Over all of this looms climate change, which, if not dealt with, will be an upheaval of which the human mind cannot conceive.

During the Cold War, the globe was in stasis due to the bipolar competition. Once the West won that war, all the animosities which had been kept under a lid boiled over. Even before the internet, those with grievances. Everyone who had been on the losing side of 20th century conflicts were suddenly freed from the cosetting of Cold War exigencies.

But the losers I'm speaking about are those who, for lack of a better term, were on the winning side. 

When the U.S. and the West had the common enemy of the Soviet Union, internal disagreements were mostly subdued. For example, the Civil Rights Revolution would not have occurred, or been allowed to occur, were it not for the fact of Cold War politics, and the fact that the struggle against fascism was fresh in everyone's minds. That victory for freedom engendered losers who saw their privileges dissipate. This famous scene encapsulates that animus:

The way Endicott breaks down in sobbing tears after Tibbs leaves after slapping him is the perfect metaphor for how white people—not just white Southerners—reacted to this strange new world which had been born out of toil and blood. A world in which they could no longer just casually lynch Black people, oppress other minorities, keep their women in control. It was a loss of power, and no one likes to lose power. Because if you lose power, you're a loser.

The losers who have joined into a coalition are a disparate bunch. Whites who want control back. Men of all races and ethnicities who want to put women back under their thumbs. Religious fundamentalists who believe God has commanded them to rule, and can't understand that the majority are against this—or, frankly, don't care, because Deus lo volt. This is, as I said on Bluesky, a rebellion of the losers, of those who see the world slipping away from them, and will move heaven and earth to right what they see as wrongs. They will murder and lay waste if they cannot have what they want.

Let's look at the most recent loser, Las Vegas bomber Matthew Livelsberger. A Trump and Elon Musk fanboy who couched his self-immolation in a Cybertruck in front of a Trump property as a "wake-up call." Not against what Trump and Musk represent, but for what they represent. He offered himself as a blood sacrifice for the Coalition of the Less which his heroes lead. Although this small man committed suicide, we can rest assured that those who come after him will turn their violence outward.

We can go back to the October 7th pogrom. Hamas is the epitome of the lost cause. Instead of building up Gaza, it mired itself in grievance over past wrongs, ruminating on the glorious Islamic civilization which had been supplanted by dirty Jews. Much like Adolf Hitler with his "Nero decree" to lay waste to Germany, as it was undeserving of life for having failed him, Hamas likewise has no concern for the Gazans under its care, willing to sacrifice them to the last in a millenarian eschatology which will see the Mahdi arrive and the world under their rule. Raping Jewish women and bashing in the skulls of Jewish babies was as nothing. And if it cost the lives of all two million Gazans? Paradise awaited them.

So, this is what we're facing as a civilization. We are facing forces which don't believe in civilization. We are facing forces which wish to tear down the civilization which has been built over millennia because they have no place in it. They are aggrieved. They are cast aside. They are lost. But they have their will and their hands and will tear it down if they can't have it.

This is not just a difference of opinion. This is not a parliamentary debate. This is an existential struggle between good and evil, light and dark, civilization and barbarity. And the forces on both sides straddle all dichotomies of nationality, race, ethnicity, gender. When you have Mexican Americans voting for a man who has promised to deport, if not them, then people in their families, we are not facing rational actors. This is a struggle between rationality and irrationality, between the superego and the id. The strength of the irrational is that it has no self-reflection, and thus no curbs on its action, unlike the rational.

This is not an argument for fighting as dirty as the enemy. But it is a call to recognize what we face. When you name a thing, you can begin to combat it. You can begin to fight it on your terms, not theirs. It is not the beginning of the end, but at least the end of the beginning. This struggle will last a long time, unless something dramatic occurs. But knowing what we face is a first step to victory.