History Will Not Wake You Gently
A meditation on Vlad Vexler's thoughts on Michael Ignatieff's essay
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.
today read ’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.
I was struck by the imagery of Auschwitz I and read the post. I live in Poland. It is a bit over an hours drive from my home to Auschwitz-Birkanau. I have been there many times. Most friends who visit me want to go there. I’m also a big fan of Vlad Vexler.
The town where I live in the Podhale region of Malopolska had a thriving Jewish community for more than five hundred years. An early Polish king had encouraged Jewish migration to Poland to build up commerce, and it worked. Prior to WWII, about one third of all Jews in the world lived in Poland. Poland’s benign treatment of Jews made it a magnet for business and for people in medicine, law and the sciences.
Now there are only about 4500 Jews living in Poland. Before the war there were between three and four million.
My town had about fifteen percent of the town that was Jewish. Now there are no Jews here. Their former synagogue is our movie theater. The old Jewish cemetery is not far from my house. On the day that the Jews were evacuated to the camps, about two hundred who were sick or old were shot at a mass grave at the cemetery. I’m sure that if you had asked them five years earlier if that was possible, they would have said that it was not. We often underestimate the danger because it is too painful to contemplate.
Only about three percent of the Jews in my town survived the war. Where some Jews from nearby areas got evacuated to labor camps, where more survived, most of the Jews from here went straight to extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz.
A few Jews who survived returned after the war. Several men tried to reclaim the synagogue but were murdered by anti-Semitic Poles. My landlord’s grandmother had hidden the possessions of some of her Jewish neighbors for them, but they never returned to claim them. The few Jews who survived returned to find Poles living in their homes and a communist puppet government. So most emigrated to British Palestine or America.
I met some of the descendants of the Jews from here when they came to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the evacuation to the camps. There was one old woman who lived here as a child and who had survived the camps. But most were children or grandchildren of survivors who have since passed away. They were quite surprised that I knew the history of the Jews here. They have mostly been forgotten. But I went by the cemetery every day and got curious so did some research on the Yad Vashem website and databases.
At one level all this seems like ancient history. But my father was a combat vet of WWII and his division had liberated some of the satellite labor camps to the Dachau concentration camp complex near Munich. It is worth remembering that Dachau started out as a camp for political dissidents who opposed the Nazis. The goal was isolation, not extermination. It all started with that. But that wasn’t how it ended. We always need to remember that. There is no pacifying autocrats. One capitulation just creates more desire for unbridled power. You have to fight at the beginning because you may not be able to fight later.
Perhaps one avenue we can approach is to fall back on a strength of the American system, localism. The core idea of the federal project is that local relationships, local representation, and ultimately local organizing. Perhaps our hope is to turn each local No Kings protest into local democratic networks and local politics that can be authentic, deeply connected, and real and ultimately fight the vapid nationalization of all things.
It's not a well-developed theory but it may be a start.