The last 60 years have been an historical anomaly — an abnormal period which lulled us into thinking that the world was getting better, that human nature was improving.  This strange period is rapidly coming to an end, and we — the United States and the rest of the world — are returning to normal.  We’re going back to the jungle, back to mankind’s true nature.

Democracy is not natural or normal.  It’s too difficult for humans and to make it work requires too much sacrifice and effort.  The American experiment is nearing its end, and as it dies it just reminds us of what a misguided notion democracy was all along for a diverse and multicultural cluster of states.  There is no such thing as a truly multiracial democracy.  We’ve just been pretending that there might be one day.

The predominate instinct of people is not to ensure a fair, equitable, and just society for all.  It’s human nature to create a society in which I and my tribal interests thrive at the expense of all others.  This is normal.

And this, all of this, is normal:

—  Barbarism is the norm.

—  Stretching back thousands of years, war, authoritarianism, exploitation, oppression, great powers crushing little ones.  These are the natural states of human societies.  This is normal.

—  The way people behaved, the way nations conducted themselves from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century were normal.

—  As recently as the 1930s, it seemed only natural that one European country would from time to time invade and occupy another.  We shouldn’t be surprised that Russia has invaded Ukraine.  That sort of thing is only natural and has been going on for thousands of years.

—  Big countries are ruled by fierce leaders with great power:  Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdogan.  That’s normal.

—  Small aristocracies in nations — tech and finance moguls in the U.S. and oligarchs in Russia — hog gigantic shares of their nations’ wealth.  That’s always been the case.  That’s normal.

—  People despise and oppress cultural outsiders, immigrants, those of other races and religions.  That’s just human nature.  It’s in our genes.

—  The authoritarianism we see today in the U.S. and around the world is just a reversion to the norm.

—  For most of human history, the law of the jungle has prevailed.  The jungle is re-growing.

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward” chaos.