Thursday night, Umair Haque wrote that when he thinks about the future, he feels “a sense of grief. Mixed with anger. It shouldn’t have turned out like…this. So much going wrong so fast that scholars now call the world a ‘polycrisis.’” The beginning of the end of the world? The end of worlds— “the democratic world, the political world, the world of international order, the economic world and the climate… For many rich Westerners, climate change isn’t going to mean the end of the world for some time to come, but for poorer people in more vulnerable countries, it’s already beginning to feel like it. The same is true across generations— when young people speak of how numb and traumatized they are, older generations, especially those in positions of power, have a hard time understanding: it’s not the end of their world. But if you’re young, and the future looks bleak, and all you face is precarity, decline, and ruin— what is the beginning of, except the end?” Why exactly? Well, in Haque’s words…
Democracy’s on the brink, halving more than halved, to just 20% of the world, in just two decades. Isn’t that the end of a world, politically? Or at least the twilight of one— after all, at that rate, there isn’t much left in a handful of years. Go ahead and ask yourself: is that the beginning of dusk falling on a democratic world?
The economy’s now mostly composed of “shadow growth,” which means that the gains of what growth there is mostly accrue to the richest, and so they’ve gone from super to ultra to mega rich, and we’re going to see the first trillionaires, probably, within this decade— yet the majority of people in the world are now getting poorer, and generation after generation’s in downward mobility. Isn’t that the end of an economic era or “world”— one of an upwards trajectory, dating back to the Industrial Revolution?
The post-war world, too, is now coming to a bitter, visible, and violent end. Conflict’s broken out across the globe, and what wars in Ukraine and Gaza teach us is that the post-war order and its institutions are no longer stable, reliable, or count for much. The horror in Ukraine shows us the limits of international order, and meanwhile, the horror in Gaza teaches us that the West, too, only selectively applies once-putatively universal ideas like the rule of law, personhood, peace, and justice.
The stable and temperate climate that human beings grew up in for 300,000 years is now coming to a swift end, and the planet’s heating up so fast that even scientists are baffled and bewildered, unable to fully explain it. Isn’t that, too, a (very literal) form of the end of the world?
Imagine that the New River Gorge Bridge, the longest single span bridge in the world outside China, collapses. That would be a catastrophe since it is strategically located along U.S. Route 19, a major north-south highway in West Virginia. This route serves as a key transportation corridor connecting cities and regions within the state, facilitating the movement of goods to and from different parts of the state and beyond. It’s a crucial link in West Virginia’s supply chain connectivity facilitating trade and commerce by providing a seamless transportation route (US Route 19) for the movement of goods between West Virginia and neighboring states, particularly Virginia, North Carolina and, indirectly, Kentucky and Ohio.
The bridge is in Fayette County, a Republican bastion since 2008. Trump won the county with nearly 69% against Biden. The bridge is crucial for Beckley, the regional hub in southern West Virginia and Raleigh’s county seat and biggest city. Raleigh County, like Fayette, is a GOP stronghold. Trump won it with 74.5% of the vote in 2020. So imagine in the bridge collapse scenario, Democrats in the Senate block aid to repair the bridge because… well, it primarily serves a bunch of Republicans and it’s probably their fault the bridge collapsed anyway since they oppose science and government action for the common good. So… screw them. That’s never going to happen; that isn’t the way Democrats think. But it is the way Republicans think and it’s what they’re saying about the catastrophic Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore. Let’s start with reactionary Republican Dan Meuser (PA), who raged against President Biden for asking for pledging to rebuild the bridge (with federal funds).
Meuser, a member of the Budget Committee, ran to Fox on Thursday, whining that “It was kind of outrageous immediately for Biden to express in this tragedy the idea that he’s going to use federal funds to pay for the entirety [of the bridge]. First reaction, frankly the only reaction, tends to be to spend. We just can’t take the easy route all the time and just try to spend the taxpayers’ money,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “There’s no thought. Just spend.” Maybe he was proposing we pray that God fix the bridge? Actually, he wants the government of Singapore to rebuild the bridge since the ship that collided with it is registered there.
Maryland’s governor is a Black Democrat and so is Baltimore’s mayor. Maryland saw Biden beat Trump 1,985,023 (65.4%) to 975,414 (32.1%). Trump only managed to draw 10.7% of the vote in 2020. On Thursday, Maegan Vazquez reported that Republicans were quick to try “to connect the tragedy to some of their most frequent political targets: diversity initiatives, illegal immigration, coronavirus lockdowns and the Biden administration. And early reaction to the incident also provided fresh ground for unfounded theories that the collapse was not an accident at all.”
One desperate crackpot, Nancy Mace (R-SC) blamed what she called Green New Deal spending instead of fixing bridges on teh collapse. Jefferson Van Drew, a MAGAt congressman from south New Jersey was, if anything, even crazier than Mace, blaming the collapse on DEI policies. “Along with Van Drew,” wrote Vazquez, “conservative political candidates and right-wing media personalities have turned to blaming diversity, equity and inclusion policies— a loosely defined term broadly used to refer to efforts to diversify the workforce and academia— for the collapse. It’s the latest in a series of issues that the right has blamed on DEI. Utah state Rep. Phil Lyman (R) blamed DEI policies for the bridge collapse. The Utah gubernatorial candidate running against Gov. Spencer Cox (R) shared another account’s post online that attacked Port of Baltimore Commissioner Karenthia Barber, a Black woman whose biography says she owns a consulting practice that takes on work related to DEI. Responding to the post about Barber’s background, Lyman wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning that “this is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.” In a subsequent post referencing the collision, he said: “DEI = DIE.”
A lunatic fringe Trumpist Anthony Sabatini, who’s running for a Florida congressional seat again, “blamed DEI for the bridge collapse in a post on Twitter the morning of the collapse. And Hung Cao, a Republican challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D) in Virginia, expressed similar frustrations, agreeing with conservative radio host Larry O’Connor, who said Buttigieg ‘spends more time talking about racial equity with regard to highways and about climate change than about focusing on the fundamentals of keeping our country and our infrastructure working. They should have had the anchors ready to drop… so that you don’t run into the bridge. But like you said, they’re so worried about other things instead of infrastructure,’ Cao, a Navy veteran, said in an appearance on O’Connor & Company on Tuesday morning.
And of course Marjorie Traitor Greene, many say Congress’ dumbest member, floated her very own conspiracy theory insinuating that the collision was “an intentional attack.”
Popular far-right social media accounts and right-wing media personalities, including some with close ties to former president Donald Trump and Republicans in office, have similarly sought to link what they see as liberal policies to the Baltimore incident. Some accounts even turned to racist tropes about Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), which have been shared thousands of times.
In an interview with Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Tuesday morning, Bartiromo, the Fox Business Network host, attempted to connect the incident to broader questions about “the potential for wrongdoing or the potential for foul play given the wide-open border.” And also that morning, Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, discussed his concerns about an unqualified, “drug-addled” workforce hamstrung by coronavirus lockdowns.
“I’m one of these people that believes we’ve never fully come out of all the lockdowns and the covid issues,” Schlapp said on Newsmax. “I’m no expert on what’s going on in the seas, but all I would say is that if you talk to employers in America, they’ll tell you that filling slots with employees who aren’t drug-addled is a very huge problem. So I’m making no specific charges here, because we don’t know… We have to kind of wake up as a country and deal with the fact that we have too many people who aren’t ready to do the job.”
Schlapp is desperate to change the media narrative about himself, after being exposed for paying off a young man whose genitals he groped to drop the charges and to lie about why he was dropping the charges.
