It is now close to 80 years since Dylan Thomas advised us to rage against the dying of the light. Those words are beginning to take on a new meaning. It is an entire society that is at danger of seeing its light die out and we seem to be going rapidly into a very bad night.
The values we share … are the values we’re losing
Most people in western society have been brought up with a set of shared values which we have tended to take for granted. Those values are expressed in a number of key institutions and processes such as free and fair elections, freedom of speech, fact-based education and some degree of protection for those at the bottom of society.
All of those things were once hugely controversial and had to be fought for. Now none of them is safe. None is immune from open or lightly disguised attack by malign influence – backed by a wall of ill-gotten money.
The President of the United States used to be one of the key figures speaking up loudly for the importance of democracy. There were plenty of occasions when this was complete hypocrisy, such as during the Pinochet coup in Chile, but it was firmly part of the political landscape that any leader of the US would accept the results of US elections and hold them when they were due.
America first … to begin going dark
This is no longer true. The president of the US openly asked his vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Instead of congratulating the man who beat him, he addressed a mob that went off and stormed Congress. Those who trashed that building and participated in a riot that killed law enforcement officers received pardons four years later, when the same man was president again.
Under Donald Trump’s leadership the wishes of electors in important free votes are deliberately and systematically undermined. When Zohran Mamdani won the election for New York mayor by a landslide, Trump’s reaction was to threaten to cut off the federal funding the city was entitled to and to send in the national guard to impose his own vision of law and order. That vision includes routinely assaulting and detaining, in squalid conditions, US citizens who are in the wrong place at the wrong time whilst being perceived to be of the wrong colour.
That victory of Mamdani has given hope to many that mid-term elections will clip Trump’s wings and put limits on the harm he can do in his last two years before the next presidential elections. The chilling reality is that there is no certainty that there will be mid-term elections. Trump is already busy gerrymandering election districts and putting in place biased election officials and procedures with the aim of ensuring victory. If those tactics fail, he is quite capable of declaring a national emergency and calling the elections off altogether.
Freedom of speech no longer
As for freedom of speech, that is something Trump speaks loudly about defending whilst working hard to undermine. Any media outlet that dares to issue the least criticism of him is sued for large sums of money and only released from the encumbrance of endless legal action when they pay up and then operate under strict limits about what they can say.
Any university that dares to teach scientific facts or allow free and open discussion of ideas can be subject to financially crippling assaults on their ability to recruit staff and students, or to receive their fair share of government funding. Social media outlets are falling increasingly under the control of a few multi billionaires, some of whom support ideas and forces even more aggressively oppressive than Trump himself. Elon Musk originates from white South Africa under apartheid, something you can tell whenever he expresses his ignorant views about life in multi-cultural London.
The oligarchs above, the rest of us below
These moves towards a society controlled and managed by a self-selected elite of the wealthy are not accidental. They are a direct result of the emergence of a group of oligarchs who believe themselves to be superior and that the rest of us need to be brought under their control. It is an ideology that is financed by extreme money and is designed to facilitate the making of ever greater extremes of money. It will stop at nothing in order to increase its power and its wealth.
Some nations, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Saudi Arabia, are already firmly under the grip of the oligarchs. The same forces in the US are looking hungrily at how the model works elsewhere and thinking they can protect themselves behind gated communities and elite golf club walls while the rest of us work as their servants or scrabble around for the scraps of income that haven’t been sucked upwards by AI.
Such a dark dystopian vision is being brought into reality at a time when the damage that relentless pursuit of profit at any cost is rapidly pushing the ecology of our planet towards the edge of survivable limits. Carbon dioxide emissions rose once again this year. Despite all the early warning signs like the floods in Valencia, the increasingly extreme damage from hurricanes, and burning droughts, the COP conference has been treated like an irrelevant sideshow that gets in the way of making a bit more money.
We must ‘blaze like meteors’
In such times, compromise with those who are trying to destroy the best parts of our society is not an option. Keir Starmer-style tea with Mussolini, sorry I meant tea with Trump, only encourages the dark forces. Trump took the publicity gain of having another state visit to Britain, then shrugged his shoulders and tried to sue the BBC into craven compliance.
If he succeeds it will be a massive defeat for free speech. The only sensible response to such crude bullying is to fight back and to champion every one of the values that we hold dear as strongly as we possibly can before they go for good.
Do not go gentle into their dark night.
