Here’s something I was going to write as an end-of-the-year post, but things got busy, so I’m writing it as a looking-back-at-2021 post:
At the end of last year, the media was full of lists of the biggest stories of 2021. Most of them were pretty much the same: Covid, inflation, Democrats not being able to pass President Biden’s Build Back Better bill, Vladimir Putin massing troops on Ukraine’s border, etc.
Inflation was like that last year. For a decade, inflation only went up a little each year. Most experts, including the Federal Reserve, said this was going to continue. But then, all of a sudden, inflation started going up a lot and it hasn’t stopped, even though officials said, for a long time, that it was only transitory.
The second point is a variation on the first – for the political sphere. It is this: Authoritarian regimes are often a lot more brittle than they seem. They look strong, and they look like they are going to last for a long time. Until all of a sudden, something happens. Often it’s something that seems minor, but suddenly, pushing for change is like pushing on an open door.
In February of 1989, people thought the division of Germany into East and West Germany would last for generations, if not forever. Erich Honecker, the head of the East German communist party, said the Berlin Wall would last for another 100 years. The Wall was gone in a little more than 250 days, and Honecker was gone before the Wall.
Much the same thing happened in Czechoslovakia. In November of 1989, a Communist Party leadership that had ruled the country with an iron hand since the failure of the Prague Spring in 1968, collapsed when, after the fall of the Wall, people started protesting in Prague and Bratislava. Timothy Garton Ash said, of events in Eastern Europe in 1989, that what took ten months in Poland, took ten weeks in Germany and ten days in Czechoslovakia. What seemed like was going to last forever was gone in weeks and even days.
What is particularly interesting about these events is not just how unexpected they were, but how minor the things that started them initially seemed to be. Similar things had occurred before and nothing happened. But this time, what seemed like a little snowball turned into a giant avalanche. In East Germany, small protests started in June of 1989, after the government phonied up the results of local elections. The government had done this before, but for some reason, this time the public protests grew in a way they hadn’t before.
In Czechoslovakia, as protests were starting, there was a rumor that a young protestor had been killed by government forces in Prague. The rumor was not true, but the protestors thought it was, and it became a force multiplier for the protesters.
Which brings me closer to a story closer to home: in Illinois. In January of 1983, twelve years after he was first elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, Michael Madigan became Speaker of the House. For 36 of the next 38 years (the Republican wave of 1994, pushed Mr. Madigan out for two years), he remained Speaker.1 And pretty much everybody expected he would stay Speaker as long as he wanted, which seemed to be just about forever. But then, all of a sudden, he was out – and gone.
Let me emphasize that the similarity in these stories is only in the suddenness and unexpected nature of what happened. Speaker Madigan may have exercised near-autocratic control over the Illinois House of Representatives, but that is not East Germany or Czechoslovakia.
Back to Illinois: Speaker Madigan’s fall may have been a result of a couple things – or at least was finally caused by a couple of things. In 2020, the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, wanted an amendment to the Illinois constitution to allow a progressive income tax. He contributed over $50 million of his own money to the campaign. And he promised that, if the amendment passed, only three per cent of taxpayers would pay more in income taxes. Yet the vote failed, 53% to 47%.
In addition, voters in Illinois get to vote, every ten years, on whether judges should retain their job. It is not a race of one person against another. It’s an up-or-down vote on the judge. If the judge gets 60% of the vote, they keep their job, and they almost always do. In fact, before 2020, no Illinois Supreme Court justice had ever failed to be retained. But in 2020, voters in central Illinois voted to not retain their Illinois Supreme Court justice, who had been originally elected as a Democrat, in a campaign that focused on Speaker Madigan and his power, not only in the legislature but also allegedly over the Illinois Supreme Court.
Even then, I’m not sure many people really saw Speaker Madigan being toppled. There was some grumbling among Democrats about the losses, but Speaker Madigan didn’t seem worried. When he “suspended” his campaign to get re-elected Speaker for the nineteenth time, he said that, if the Democratic members of the Illinois House wanted to elect somebody else as speaker, they could. It was seen as him trying to show that nobody else could win. But, to the surprise of almost everybody, the Democrats did elect someone else. After 36 years, Speaker Madigan was gone, kicked out by his own party. And it got even worse. After losing the Speaker’s job, he resigned as a state representative and couldn’t even get his designated replacement selected to fill his own now-vacant seat.2 His power went from near total to almost zero in just a couple of weeks. It was amazing – and totally unexpected.
But that’s the point. We don’t always know what’s going to happen – until it does. We can’t see things changing – until they do. I think this is especially true in dictatorships like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but it can also be true in elected autocracies like Illinois. They become brittle, but you don’t see the brittleness until they start to crack. But once they start to crack, they often go very quickly because they are so brittle.
Often, the brittleness of autocracies is not obvious because people are afraid to complain. Because people are too afraid to speak up, they don’t realize other people are unhappy, too. In East Germany and Czechoslovakia, if people complained, they could lose their jobs or even be thrown in jail. Speaker Madigan couldn’t do things like that, but he did have almost total control of the legislative process in the Illinois House. If he didn’t like you or if you publicly criticized him too much, he could make sure your bills went nowhere.
But once a few people decide to speak up, regardless of the consequences, other people realize they are not alone and they speak up, too. If the autocracy can’t stop this, if it is brittle, change can happen – and suddenly.
But this fact of sudden change isn’t true just in government and politics. It’s true in other areas, too, as with the example of inflation I mentioned above. Just because things have been one way for what seems like a long time, doesn’t mean they will always be that way. Sometimes you can’t tell that things are going to change until they do. Some little thing happens, something that has happened before, but this time, it makes a difference, and suddenly, things change.
Which, I suppose, raises the question of where might this happen next or what might change. But that misses the point: you never know until it happens. You can hope it might be one thing and it’s not. You can think something is going to stay the same, because it’s been that way for a long time, but then, it’s not that way anymore. Which means, you should always be prepared, and maybe, like in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, a little hopeful – because you never know.3
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1 Which was almost eight years longer than the Berlin Wall lasted.
2 His designated replacement was appointed, but he had to resign a couple of days later, at which point somebody else was appointed.
3 But you also need to be careful because change, if it does happen, is not always for the good.
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