August now feels like its last days are being played out to Peggy Lee singing, “Is That All There Is?” But this also goes for Western neoliberal society.
In the Before Times, these waning days of summer carried a weary melancholic echo of the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Now a different sadness comes on the winds that carry the cries of cicadas. It is the anguish over how much is fucked up and how little can be done to change it, short of ordinary people risking their own lives, their kin and their comrades to do so.
There is a sorrow cut with rage over knowing our governments, news media, corporate managers, and most of our intellectual class have squared the circle of mass killing to perpetuate their entitled positions in society.
They have so much contempt for ordinary human life, as demonstrated by their continuing support of a genocide against Palestinians, the siege of Cuba, a forever war in Ukraine, and the war with Iran.
It becomes a question of when, not if, our governments will put you or me in a camp, on a kill list, or just let us perish in a homeless encampment. You don’t build the infrastructure for repression without intending to use it.
There is an urge, as in the last lines of The Great Gatsby, to beat on against the current carrying us towards a future we rightly fear. But even if we could row back to a shore that felt safe to us, where would that be: 2019, 2015, 2009, 1999, or 1981?
Capitalism has fought the idea of a Welfare State since 1945, when socialists and social democrats attempted to bridle the wealth and power of society's wealthiest through taxation, state ownership of key industries, strong laws to protect workers, support for trade unionism, comprehensive assistance to the vulnerable, and universal public healthcare. This battle to civilise capitalism was lost over the past decade, and now society has few options for survival. Believing you can vote yourself out of fascism isn't one of them.
Summer 2026 is just a worsening repeat of every summer since we were coerced into neoliberalism as humanity’s credo to exist.
The heat domes, wildfires, air poisoned by the soot of forests ablaze, the floods, the droughts, and the crop failures aren’t caused by someone idling an SUV in a drive-through waiting for a Big Mac. It is because capitalism sold us the idea that endless consumption was prosperity that gave existence meaning.
We took it for something like the myth of Prometheus giving humanity fire. Instead, it has become the myth of Sisyphus: we are condemned to roll the rock up the mountainside forever, while the billionaires and their minions plunder the planet, exploit our labour, and enrich themselves to immeasurable proportions, a process that can only end with humanity’s extinction.
The West’s faith in neoliberalism has become cult-like because no major political movement is demanding the wholesale destruction of neoliberalism.
Instead, individual political parties or politicians assert, either cynically or naively, that the system can still be reformed with UBI or wealth taxes. The genocide in Gaza has already proved the system doesn’t care about individual human life unless it comes from the wealthier Western enclaves.
Trump’s domestic policy proves this every day, whether it’s his attacks on migrants and the homeless or his assault on what remains of America’s democratic institutions.
Trump is not an anomaly because it takes a village to raise a Hitler.
Trump’s racism, cruelty, stupidity, greed, and megalomania are institutional. In an empire based on oligarchies of wealth, there will always be more Trumps to replace him than FDRs.
Knowing this doesn’t make me resigned to accepting it; it only makes me more aware of what awaits us.
As I sit here writing this near the shores of Lake Ontario, my optimism that Canada will hold out or win against Trump’s brutal trade war against it isn’t strong.
This is the formal beginning of the nation’s annexation by the USA. It won’t happen overnight or in a year. It may not even be like a 51st State arrangement: something like Vichy, perhaps.
But it will occur because empires got to consume, or else they fall.
Either way, this is just an era of Is That All There Is? until people rise up.
Thank you for reading and supporting this Substack.
Your support helps keep me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith.
The fight to keep going was made worse by getting cancer along with lung disease and other comorbidities, which makes life more difficult in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can, join with a paid subscription, which is just £3.50 a month, or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. A Tip Jar is also available. But if you can’t, it’s all good because we are fellow travellers in penury.
I’ve also reduced yearly subscriptions by 40% during the final week of August to help with my rent. 5 new subscribers should cover it.
It’s been a long haul to complete my dad’s Green and Pleasant Land — the unfinished story of his generation’s youth, which Harry left behind.
It traces his life, family, contemporaries and working class history from 1923 to July 1945, ending with Labour’s landslide victory.
I don’t know who will raise all boats in the 21st century — it certainly won’t be Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the U.S., or the Liberals in Canada. The West has entered its Last Orders phase. The fight for a better future will be as bitter as it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s going to take every shoulder to the wheel to push us out of this dystopia.
Take care,
John
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