History Will Not Wake You Gently

A meditation on Vlad Vexler's thoughts on Michael Ignatieff's essay

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

It will not tap you on the shoulder and give you time to prepare. It will not announce itself with clarity and give you the comfort of knowing exactly when to act.

History wakes us with the slap.

Vlad Vexler

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Michael Ignatieff

’s essay on American democratic decline on his YouTube channel, and what struck me most wasn’t the catalogue of constitutional violations—we’ve documented those exhaustively. It was Vlad’s observation about our cultural sleep: “We’re asleep as a culture and we’re going to stay asleep because our rate of waking up is very very very slow indeed.”

He estimates we won’t fully grasp the democratic decline that began in the early 2010s until the middle 2030s. By then, the choice will have been made through accommodation—each violation normalized, each evil deemed sufferable, each step toward authoritarianism accepted because the alternative seemed too frightening to face. The slap arrives not from outside but from the accumulated weight of our own indifference.

Ignatieff’s essay catalogs what we’re losing in real time: officers of law who owe allegiance to law rather than the president who appointed them, police who wear badges and keep faces uncovered so citizens can lodge complaints, the requirement for warrants before entry into homes, the right of institutions to govern themselves free from political control. These aren’t abstract principles—they’re the concrete infrastructure of democratic life that most of us never thought about until we watched them systematically dismantled.

Vlad identifies what makes this dismantling so psychologically difficult to process: “There is a crisis in our culture including specifically a crisis of men... a kind of personal unraveling that’s accompanied by the political unraveling.” When people personally fragment—losing capacity for coherent relationships, meaningful work, stable identity—they become less effective citizens. The professional freakout becomes indistinguishable from personal collapse, creating exactly the depoliticized paralysis that makes democratic resistance impossible.

But here’s where Vlad’s reading becomes most challenging: he argues that intellectual awakening alone won’t save us. “People are not going to wake up to the fact that we’re losing democracy in virtue of just being reminded that we’re losing democracy. They’re going to wake up to the fact that we’re losing democracy only if you offer actually a package of civic renewal that speaks to people based on the values of solidarity and patriotism.”

This creates a paradox he names directly in a recent conversation: “The kind of politics that we need to tackle the breakdown in social trust requires social trust to get actually voted in and to win power.” How do you build the trust necessary to win power to rebuild trust? How do you organize democratic renewal when the social forces destroying democracy—algorithmic manipulation, atomization, economic exclusion—make democratic organizing nearly impossible?

His answer acknowledges brutal constraints: we don’t have the resources of social trust that enabled New Deal liberalism. The social forces we face—the attention extraction economy, the systematic replacement of authentic relationship with artificial alternatives, the algorithmic fragmentation of sustained reasoning capacity—these aren’t fully within our control. Some we can inflect by small percentages that matter enormously for millions of people. Others we’re simply stuck with.

Yet even facing these constraints, Vlad refuses despair. He estimates high probability of democratic collapse in America within twenty years—but that means significant chance of survival even without effective counter-action, and far better odds if we build the political project that the moment demands. Such organizing is frustrated by what I’ve elsewhere called moral inversion—the redefinition of vigilance as hysteria and accommodation as reasonableness.

The question is whether we’ll wake up before the slap lands. Whether we’ll recognize that hooded figures bundling people into unmarked cars, that military forces patrolling American cities, that systematic judicial corruption represents not aberration but transformation—the conversion of democratic governance into authoritarian administration.

Ignatieff ends with the founding insight: in a democracy, power checks power to keep the people free. Not majority rule or mob rule, but majority rule balanced by law, rights, and the counter-power of free institutions from universities to sports clubs.

History won’t give us time to accept this gradually. The slap is coming. And as Vlad observes with characteristic sobriety: we’re mostly not ready, and readiness may not arrive until long after the choice has been made for us through our accommodation.

The question isn’t whether we’ll be awakened. The question is whether enough of us will be conscious when it happens.