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Cthulhu always swims right.
A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.
Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.
Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.
I can very definitely tell that Freddy is an actual Marxist communist when he rights ‘America has two right wing parties’. Both parties are, by global standards, pretty centrist, progressive on social issues(one of them only moderately so), pro-business capitalist(one of them only lukewarmly), moderately nationalist, anti-isolationist, and liberal. The GOP is well to the left of major right wing parties like Likud and PiS on social issues; the DNC is well to the right of major left wing parties like die Linke on economics. By global standards, our parties are pretty compressed on a spectrum.
If you take the USA as a wealthier Latin American country, we ‘should’ have a have-not party which claims to be socialist but is actually more interested in corruption, and a party of the haves which is anti communist and tough on crime, and a populist far-right party which openly praises the idea of becoming a fascist dictatorship. If you take the US as an eccentric European country, we ‘should’ have a socialist party, a Green Party, two centrist right wing parties, and a far right party. In reality we have two centrist parties.
And while ‘Cthulhu always swims left’ is an oversimplification to the point of inaccuracy, ‘Cthulhu swims right’ is true only in stupid definitional games.
If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe: European-level levels of tax and social benefits are well outside your Overton window, most pro-corporate policies like Citizens United and the DMCA have strong bipartisan support, both parties are in favour of prison terms and conditions that would make the eyes of Europeans water, and both parties are in favour of foreign interventions and maintaining the size of your military-industrial apparatus.
In Europe, support for US-style business-friendly policies exists but generally feels pretty artificial (backed by politicians recognized to be US plants and understood as the cost of doing business with the US), US levels of taxation and benefits are not backed by any serious party, US-style punishment is sometimes advocated for particular cases by tabloids but I have not seen it as a general platform, and support for militarization has only noticeably crept up since about 2014 (Ukraine) or perhaps 2016 (Trump's first term).
I watched non-authoritarian Europe beating elderly people bloody when they protested against strict lockdown policies. And then I watch as they imprison thousands for rather mundane political speech on social media platforms.
Is there a single party in all of Europe who supports free speech as a principle? Or gun rights? Or religious freedom? Or education freedom? What about one which didn't wholesale endorse vast totalitarianism over its population and lock them indoors for over a year in some places?
As far as I can tell, this sort of frame is impervious to any experience. I regularly see boomers in the US talk about their guns being important if authoritarianism ever really showed up and yet they were few and far between when US sheriffs were arresting priests for holding church services, an act which has been constitutionally protected conduct at the federal and state level for hundreds of years.
It's like a security blanket: at some point in the future, when "authoritarianism" happens, they'll be ready. Just like we still have Europeans who are ready to criticize the "authoritarianism" of the US while they cheered police beating the elderly for violating totalitarian public health mandates for years. Surely. they'll also oppose it when "authoritarianism" ever makes it to the shores of the old continent.
What does "authoritarianism" even mean if it doesn't include the years of ridiculous behavior during the covid hysteria? Europeans will cheer authoritarianism whenever they think they need it to accomplish their bureaucratic meddling in every part of life and it's mostly by chance it hasn't more often. Europeans don't have militaries because they're satropies of the United States and expect its military's protection. If they thought they needed it, we would see vans going street by street and kidnapping military aged males just like we see it in Ukraine. And I bet I would still see Europeans talking about "authoritarian" United States, as opposed to Europe.
I see this talking point a lot and it always irritates me. Britain has 200 H-bombs. France has about 200 H-bombs. The European half of NATO has about 1.5 million professional soldiers, several carrier squadrons, huge numbers of tanks, aircraft and submarines... They have BAE, Rheinmetall, Eurofighters. They have 450 million people! It does not matter whether they spend 2% of GDP or 3% or 1%, what matters is the actual balance of capabilities.
How does Russia threaten Europe? This isn't 1978. Russian conventional forces are outmatched and pure demography is massively against them. There's no way 140 million people conquer 450 million when tech and wealth leans vaguely towards the latter.
The only thing the Russians have that Europe does not is a much larger nuclear arsenal and large-scale munitions production. The notion that Europe is somehow leeching off the US makes zero sense. They already have broad conventional superiority. Even with higher munitions output Russia is not capable of rushing through to Warsaw, let alone Berlin and wouldn't take such risks anyway. Why would they get into a war with several nuclear powers?
The US is actually a major threat to Europe, causing retarded wars in the Middle East with damaging flow-on effects into Europe. Or their rather successful gambit to split Russia from Europe. No more cheap energy from Russia, get excited about expensive energy from America! Of course the Europeans bear much of the blame for passively sitting back and letting the US protect them from competitive energy prices and homogenous, high-trust society. Nevertheless, the US is ultimately at fault.
The US's real dependants are in the Pacific - Australia, Japan, South Korea. They actually face an industrially, demographically, militarily potent foe in China.
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