Applied historical perspective re: surviving economic inequality?
December 2, 2024 12:10 PM   Subscribe

I've had a thought in the back of my mind for a long time that we (the US at least) are moving back towards the Gilded Age, and possibly even Victorian England, in terms of levels of inequality and economic stratification coupled with legal oppression of certain groups (in the past, perhaps Catholics; today, perhaps.... a long list of other identities). Has anyone written a kind of "here's what works" retrospective on surviving and thriving in those contexts, with an aim towards guiding people today based on what we know about the past?

For example, I imagine that if there isn't an LGBTQ+ modern-day version of the Green Book, there might be in the next 10 years. Who has thought about this sort of thing deeply and rigorously?
posted by Number Used Once to Society & Culture (7 answers total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
The WSPU invented the letter bomb and now I can vote.
posted by phunniemee at 12:23 PM on December 2 [5 favorites]


are you asking for resources because you are unfamiliar and need signposts to help you research, or...?
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:58 PM on December 2 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Since the election, Timothy Burke (substack) has been publishing a series of historical essays on authoritarian regimes, how they gained power and how they eventually lost it:

Let The Bad Times End (1): Apartheid
Let The Bad Times End (2): Pinochet
Let the Bad Times End (3): Duterte
Let The Bad Times End (4): The Soviet Union

In the introduction to the first one, he writes: "I’m not going to be shy about drawing analogies, but I’m also going to stress the differences between then and now. I can’t promise these will be encouraging, either. That is part of what we need to be thinking about now."
posted by verstegan at 2:21 PM on December 2 [18 favorites]


Response by poster:
are you asking for resources because you are unfamiliar and need signposts to help you research, or...?
I'm hoping to avoid having to spend 6 months reading existing academic research and non-fiction history / anthropology / big idea books about different time periods and governments all over the world throughout the past couple hundred years in order to synthesize some original thoughts on the subject.

I'd much rather read the work of someone who got paid to do so for a book, or who is doing it for a podcast or series of video essays, or who is a researcher who just so happens to research that particular thing, or read a collection of related but disparate popular articles recommended here that touch on relevant themes.
posted by Number Used Once at 2:59 PM on December 2 [2 favorites]


Best answer: You might find Masha Gessen's Surviving Autocracy helpful. Gessen was raised in the Soviet Union and writes with great insight and understanding about the Soviet regime, Russian/Soviet politics and history, and American politics. Surviving Autocracy came out in 2020, and it does detail the rise of the right-wing in the USA but also provides some roadmap for getting through it.
posted by Well I never at 4:21 PM on December 2 [6 favorites]


I have found these two essays by Dmitry Orlov interesting. They're one guy's opinion based on lived experience, not scholarly works, but still -- interesting. He's written some books as well, though I haven't read them.
- Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
- How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
posted by ourobouros at 8:28 AM on December 4


I want to add, because I've learned about new resources just this past week:

I went to a workshop last week, led by Quakers, called "Getting Organized for the Time We are In." It was very good and really helped me feel both settled and determined, and comfortable with how I might proceed given my strengths and limitations.

They cited the resources they relied on in preparing it, which were:

The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook and Podcast by Scot Nakagawa.

Daniel Hunter – 10 Ways to be Prepared and Grounded Now that Trump Has Won & ChooseDemocracy.us

Kristianna Smith – Seed Packets for Liberated Practice & video postings on IG

adrienne maree brown – Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds


I actually re-read the Masha Gessen this week. Written in 2020, it starts out feeling like a rehash of the first T's presidency timeline, but later it gets more analytical in a way I found helpful, so I was glad I stuck with it.
posted by Well I never at 2:54 PM on December 13


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