If that should occur, the future of North America and Europe may look a lot like the present of Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few swollen metropolitan areas surrounded by hinterlands that are derelict, depopulated, and despised. What Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with its managers in skyscrapers and its oppressed factory workers underground, was for an earlier industrial era, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), with its sybaritic elite in orbit and its desperate earthbound slum-dwellers, might prove to be for the era that succeeds neoliberalism—a prophecy in the form of a nightmare.
Only power can check power. Only a major reassertion of the political power, economic leverage, and cultural influence of national wage-earning majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds can stop the degeneration of the US and other Western democracies into high-tech banana republics. To supplement conventional electoral politics, reformers will need to rebuild old institutions or build new ones that can integrate working-class citizens of all origins into decision-making in government, the economy, and the culture, so that everyone can be an insider.
Reconstructing democratic pluralism in North America and Europe to permit cross-class power sharing is a challenge as difficult as it is urgent. The alternative is grim: a future of gated communities and mobs led by demagogues at their gates.
Song of Myself (I)
1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
2
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
But he could still be heard. ‘The forest that killed Quim is far away from here, and Warmaker still stands untouched. We haven’t done justice here tonight. We’ve done murder and massacre.’
‘Piggies are Piggies!’
‘Are they? Would you like that if it went the other way?’
Grego took a few steps toward one of the men who looked tired and unwilling to go on, and spoke directly to him, while pointing at the mob’s spokesman. ‘You! Would you like to be punished for what he did?’
‘No,’ muttered the man.
‘If he killed someone, would you think it was right for somebody to come to your house and slaughter your wife and children for it?’
Several voices now. ‘No.’
‘Why not? Humans are humans, aren’t we?’
When the Great Mortality—the bubonic plague—arrived in Europe in 1348, sweeping away up to a third of the population, conspiracy theories about Jews poisoning water supplies spread like wildfire. Although some contemporaries pointed out that Jews were also dying of the plague and therefore were probably innocent of the crime, entire Jewish communities were slaughtered by enraged mobs.
Although the Church did not initiate or encourage local violence against Jews, at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) Pope Innocent III made clear the inferior, degraded status of Jews within the Western sociospiritual order, mandating that they wear special identifying markers on their clothing, forbidding them to interact with or hold any authority over Christians.
Asimov would summarize its nature this way:
"Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again."
Paul IV is a genuinely tragic figure, a man of unflinching courage and integrity, robbed of real greatness by a fatal narrowness of vision, and by his inability to apply to his own family the bleak and unwavering scrutiny he turned on everyone else. He was the most hated Pope of the century, and when he died no one mourned him. Joyful mobs rampaged through the streets of Rome, his statues were toppled and smashed, and the cells of the Inquisition broken open to release the prisoners.
