The countercultural left and the countercultural right nourish two equivalent political fantasies.

The left hopes (or used to hope) for some manner of revolution, in which the oppressed classes will rise up, tear down the oppressive structures of capitalism or colonialism or privilege, and establish a new, enduring egalitarian utopia.

Many on the right, conversely, imagine an imminent political collapse. Either our post-liberal states will succumb to their internal contradictions and dissolve of their own accord, or populist protests against managerial excesses and the ‘deep state’ will bring the system to its knees. The Founders’ Sp... Rabb, Steven Best Price: $15.79 Buy New $24.24 (as of 11:52 UTC - Details)

Whenever I doubt these scenarios, I get angry replies. One reader, for example, responded to my piece on England Burning by complaining that I “seem to not understand that if there is enough of what is going on in Great Britain it will bring down a government and even a nation.” These views are not only naive; they can be self-defeating and even harmful. First, they encourage unreasonable expectations around every populist backlash. When protests inevitably fail to destroy the prevailing order, many become demoralised and claim that nothing ever happens. Second, they make people easy to manipulate. There are bad state actors who are eager to criminalise the political opposition by inciting them to commit indictable offences, and there is also a whole world of opportunists who peddle wild sensational scenarios for internet attention.

Here I want to explain why collapse scenarios are unrealistic, and what kind of political change we can legitimately hope for. The clear-eyed view should not depress you. To begin with, Mad Max-style social and political turmoil may sound exhilarating, but in truth it would be an unmitigated catastrophe that few of us would survive. As scenarios for political change go, it’s also unnecessary. We don’t need total collapse to solve our most pressing problems.

The present world and recent history teach us that modern states are incredibly robust – so robust that I can’t find a single good example of any one anywhere simply dissolving of its own accord, or being brought down by internal disorder. I invite you to consider this listing of countries according to the “Fragile State Index,” and contemplate how many governments across the world have persisted in the face of widespread catastrophic disorder, riots, famines, insurrections and long-burning civil wars. As my friend Bob remarked,

Africa in general has been an unending cycle of war, decline and kleptocracy, yet none of these African states have collapsed completely. People underestimate just how durable even seemingly artificial modern political units can be … In general, the modern managerial state is extremely durable, people think that ‘complex systems won’t survive the competency crisis’, but as Africa shows … there will always be some bureaucrat at the tax office harassing the population even if the state has been overrun by warlord militias, unless he is actively removed.1

It is very sobering. And if you don’t like Africa, ponder National Socialist Germany in World War II, which suffered cataclysmic military setbacks and devastating bombing campaigns that left millions homeless, but the state itself unfazed. In the end, the allies had to overwhelm the Wehrmacht, physically invade German territory and directly seize, partially dismantle and reform the state apparatus.

As a rule, then, we can safely say that modern states don’t just fall apart, even when subjected to enormous pressures. What history provides, instead, are examples of a rather different thing – namely, regime change. This is what happened to the nations of the Warsaw Pact after 1989 and to tsarist Russia in 1917. Upon closer inspection, the favoured precedents of the collapsitarian crowd mostly turn out to be instances of regime change, because these commentators conceive of collapse in a very undifferentiated way.

States act through their institutions. It is through institutions that they collect taxes, build infrastructure and enforce the criminal code. Above these institutions is the political leadership, which in theory directs them as our brain directs our bodies. As always, these distinctions are blurred in practice. State institutions have considerable say in political power, and especially in liberal democracies this power is also shared with a wide array of non-state actors and institutions, from corporations to academia to non-governmental organisations and international bodies.

At first glance, you’d think liberal democracies would be extremely vulnerable to regime change; after all, we elect new political leadership every few years. But in fact they’re not, and the reason is precisely this defensive sharing of power beyond the formal confines of the state. The aim is to remove a great part of decision-making from the scrutiny of the electorate. In consequence, liberal democracies function in highly opaque ways, and involve vastly more people in the political process than is strictly necessary. This causes them to act in irrational ways, it subjects their policies to incredible inertia, and often it lends the impression that they’re surely on the verge of falling apart. In fact, it’s the opposite. These pathologies are side-effects of the measures they’ve taken to achieve political stability. The Unprotected Class:... Carl, Jeremy Best Price: $19.29 Buy New $19.24 (as of 07:47 UTC - Details)

Institutions are responsible for the robustness of the state, because they are so inextricably intertwined with society. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we must interact with state institutions and the infrastructure they create and maintain. For better or worse, they are how we live, and we can’t help but offer them our implicit support. The political leadership, at one remove from this daily reality, is accordingly more vulnerable. After 1989, the Socialist Unity Party lost power in the DDR and the institutional apparatus fell into the hands of the West German political elite, who purged it of communist officials and rebuilt it according to Western norms. This rather more qualified version of political collapse is the only one for which we have good precedent. The institutions will generally be reformed or wiped out only after regime change, and only from above.

As we move upwards in the political hierarchy, we find that state structures become ever more fragile. Local entities can and do appropriate authority from central, imperial authorities. This was how the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476, with power devolving almost entirely to the barbarian foederati, who had long become the only military muscle that mattered in Europe. The eastern emperors still claimed formal (if often fictional) jurisdiction over the West, even recognising various barbarian leaders as their proxies. As a central authority, however, they had little practical significance. A bypassed imperial government like this can exist for centuries, broadly ignored by the provinces. For a modern example, we can look to the Soviet Union, which lost power to its constituent nations after the failure of communism in 1990. In these cases and others, we see once again that crumbling happens at the top first, while the institutions at the bottom can hang on for a very long time.

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