Algorithms.

It’s generally easier to destroy something than to create something, and it’s easier to consolidate power than to take it when you don’t have it. Also the left tends to be principled, while the right tends to be focused on gaining and keeping power. There are things conservatives would happily do that are strategically valuable that we typically just straight up wouldn’t even if it meant a win.

If you want to build up social services and fight for the rights and well-being of common people, you have to be able to make pretty broad coalitions while also figuring out how to actually make things better and convincing people that you know what you’re doing. If you want to win power without caring about anyone else, all you have to do is ally yourself with those who already have power and not speak up when they hurt others.

The flip side, fortunately, is that eventually all that self-serving power ends up being used to elevate smaller and smaller groups of people as it’s consolidated. As resources and influence collect at the top, more and more people suffer as they’re left behind. Eventually the number of people harmed has sometimes been enough that it naturally begins to form the kind of broad coalitions needed to overthrow the most obvious sources of corruption and suffering, but keeping those coalitions once the immediate danger is over is another matter entirely.

It certainly doesn’t help that authoritarians seem to have gotten better at disruption and disinformation. Polarizing society in the way that we see with bot farms run by Russian and Chinese intelligence in the past few years means most of their work can be done without much actual precision. Get everybody angry and get them to disagree on what’s going on in the world and they stand a lot less of a chance of coming together to oppose entrenched power structures.

There’s still a clock on the whole thing, because they’re making the situation more dangerous for themselves by increasing instability, and eventually it’ll probably bite them in the ass. But, will it happen by the time the current crop of powerful authoritarians are dead? Eh… Maybe? Who knows?

Unfortunately we also have a clock running as a species, and if we don’t figure out how to get around these atomizing disinformation systems and start to dismantle all this consolidated authoritarian power (both in governments and economically), we may not have an opportunity to wait until we reach a critical mass of suffering.

Also, like, it would really suck to have to live through the process of getting there anyway.

The best we can hope for, as far as I can tell, is some alternate means of wide-spread awareness. Some kind of movement in art or music might be helpful, if it can be extricated from the existing economic and social power structures. Basically, something like what the counter-culture was trying to do in the 60s, or what punks were doing coming up a little closer on the turn of the century.

The power of those coalitions was pretty temporary, though, and both seem to have been co-opted by people who, once again, just wanted to consolidate power for their own ends. The extent of their impact is debatable, but I have a feeling we need something substantially bigger than either of those movements.

the news about climate crisis and increasing international tensions make people (rightfully) more and more worried about their lives and well-being, so it’s easy to sell Going Back To How It Used To Be as the solution

Now you know how most Americans felt when Mango Mussolini got elected again.