It is human nature to ignore gathering storms until the tornado, hurricane, cyclone, or blizzard comes into plain view. In recent years, repetitive weather disasters have caused so much physical damage in certain areas of the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, that today some preparations, with the aid of new and sophisticated technology, do take place.But gathering storms of political disaster do not seem to merit the same attention as the weather. Perhaps it is the naive belief that these storms of the recent past, such as world wars, holocausts and ethnic cleansing, cannot recur that inspires such passivity. In an advanced capitalist democracy such as ours, there is also a resistance to any deliberate change in our comfortable lives, and instead of vigilance we have indulged ourselves in a chronic politics of spectator political combat, reserving our emotions and passions for rhetorical electoral contests which have become so abstract they are essentially meaningless in the real world.
The gathering storm of the 21st century is quite visible in many places in the world, but apparently not sufficiently for many Americans to see it coming. When individuals, including the president of the United States, try to warn the citizenry that this storm has yet to hit the country in full force, they are dismissed by many Americans, most of them bitter partisans of the party out of power, as well as pacifists and radical populists, as prevaricators, warmongers and incompetents.