“Trump is Hitler,” screamed the more excitable parts of the media throughout 2016. The logic seems to be: everything unlikeable is “fascism”; Trump is especially unlikeable and therefore must be especially fascist. You don’t get more fascist than Hitler, ergo …

This is reflex rather than thought. If we’re really looking to compare Trump to an historical German, Martin Luther is a much better candidate.

I recently watched a CNN series on Netflix called Race for the White House. It covers six presidential election races from the last couple of centuries, usually races where an underdog has won, and examines what happened. In two of the six cases, the winner was not just an unlikely candidate, but an entirely new political party emerged.

More often than not, a change in communications technology has led to the upset, although this wasn’t explicitly called out by the show. CNN may not want to admit that dominant media can rapidly become irrelevant.

In 1828 Andrew Jackson became the first ever Democratic Party president, beating out the incumbent John Quincy Adams. Adams was an old-style aristocratic leader, not interested in anything as crass as campaigning. Jackson knew that a popular election in a democracy could be won by appealing to people and used newspapers effectively for the first time.

The Republican Party got its first president in 1860 – Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a captivating speaker, but his team also knew how to get his words out quickly to a national audience using the telegraph.

JFK was famously the first television president, beating out Richard Nixon, who was clearly uncomfortable with the new medium.

Jackson and Lincoln both used new technologies to bring new parties into power. JFK didn’t bring a new party into power, but the new civil rights era Democratic Party was a new thing in an old skin, nothing like the Democratic Party of the Old South.

Likewise, the Republican Party brought into power by Donald Trump is not the Republican Party of old, but a new creature that has taken over the body of its host. He, too, has used a new communications medium, Twitter, to launch his insurgency.

The archetypal example of a new communications technology overthrowing incumbents is, of course, the Reformation. A dominant institution, the Catholic Church, and its political system, feudalism, met their match in Martin Luther. Luther and his Protestants used Gutenberg’s newly-invented printing press to great effect, producing huge numbers of pamphlets written in German rather than Latin to spread their message.

Luther was a 16^th-century shitposter extraordinaire. Infamous for his short temper and way with words, Luther would have nailed Twitter.

Trump and his supporters see the modern political system as decayed and corrupt, in much the same way as the Church was seen five hundred years ago. They want to see America taken back to its glory days, some mythical bygone golden age, to “Make America Great Again”.

Luther set off a revolution that created the modern world, but that’s not what he was trying to do. In a similar vein to Trump, he thought that the “modern” (i.e. 16^th century) church had become decayed and corrupt. Despite his fascination with Gutenberg’s press, the most modern communications tool available in late-medieval Europe, his revolution, like Trump’s, was backwards-looking. He wanted to revert the Church to its lost golden age. He wanted to “Make Christendom Great Again”.

Ultimately, Luther set Europe on a track that led to the world as we know it today – nation states, democracy, and the scientific revolution. But that was completely unintended. And to come out the other side, Europe had to suffer through the Thirty Years’ War, a war that killed a quarter of the population of Germany – half the population in some areas – and many more outside Germany. Its embers still flicker.

As our decrepit, debt-ridden democratic welfare states totter toward their failure, we have no idea what’s going to be on the other side of the upheaval. The modern state is decayed and corrupt, built on top of technologies that have irreversibly shifted, and the world is changing, as it did during the Reformation.

There’s no going back to “normal,” to the days before Trump, and pretending it was all a bad dream. But there’s no going back to the golden age imagined by Trump’s supporters either. We need to invent the future.

Knowing what happened five hundred years ago should make us think about the path we take from here. The biggest question in politics today is: how do we get to where we’re going without another Thirty Years’ War?

The last time anyone walked on the moon was the day before I was born. I’m a bit bummed at missing the show.

And what a show it was. The Soviet Union had taken a surprise early lead in the Space Race, putting Sputnik, Earth’s first artificial satellite, into orbit, and following up with Yuri Gagarin’s first human spaceflight. “Today, for the first time, a man has flown in space,” announced an American newsreader, “and that man is a communist,” he concluded, voice as grave as America’s Cold War second-placing.

Against that dire background, President Kennedy ignited America’s imagination, upping the stakes with a race to the moon, and kicking off the Apollo project.

Apollo, and the four hundred thousand people who worked on the project, burned through twenty-five billion dollars, back when a billion was a lot, and achieved Kennedy’s goal. “We came in peace, for all mankind,” America announced, happy to have spectacularly overpowered the Russians.

The United States was the richest, most powerful, most scientifically advanced entity that had ever existed.

It’s no wonder that in moments of malaise, when we feel that something big needs to be done, that people call for a new Apollo project. It might be a new Apollo project for clean energy, or infrastructure renewal, or, for those with more stunted lateral thinking, flying big rockets to somewhere.

A visionary politician, a starry-eyed speech with a decade long commitment, and a shit-ton of government money and we can do the impossible, unite the people, and revitalise the nation.

But any new Apollo project is a mirage.

Apollo was a child of the Cold War and conditions that no longer exist. The Cold War was a spending competition. Superpowers, by definition, were those countries that controlled the most firepower. The signifiers of superpower, aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, all carry unbelievable explosive force and are all ferociously expensive.

Ever since gunpowder arrived on the scene at the end of the fifteenth century, blasting through protective city walls, the key to political power has been the ability to purchase firepower. Gunpowder gave way to high explosives and then to nuclear weapons. States became empires. Empires became superpowers.

Global politics became a winner-takes-all game of who could buy the most explosives. At the end of World War II, we were down to the final round: the United States of America versus the Soviet Union, for the superpower championship of the world.

The key question of the Cold War was: who can buy the most bombs? Was it going to be the Soviet government with total control of the economy of the largest country in the world? Or was it going to be the American government, taxing the profits of a freer economy?

The point of the Apollo project had very little to do with science, and even less to do with “peace for all mankind.” It had everything do with upping the stakes in a massive spending competition. The point of the Apollo project was to be expensive for the sake of being expensive, in a way that demonstrated to the world America’s ability to spend extravagantly on firepower.

The point was made. It’s more effective to tax half the wealth of a relatively free economy than to take the entire output of a planned economy. Ultimately the Soviet Union couldn’t afford to keep up with the aircraft carriers and stealth bombers and Star Wars lasers and the empire collapsed, leaving the United States as the dominant military force on the planet.

There will never be a “new Apollo project” because the conditions that made the Apollo project no longer exist. The logic that underpinned Apollo was the logic that “he with the most firepower wins.” But at the same time that that logic was reaching it’s peak, with the moon shot and the nuclear arms race, the technology that supported that logic was changing.

The centuries-long rule of increasing firepower has exhausted itself. The two superpowers created weapons that are literally too dangerous to use. At the same time, both superpowers have been fought to a standstill in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere by enemies using cheap improvised weapons. Technology increasingly favours the defender.

Apollo was a success because it matched the political reality of its day. Any “new Apollo project” would achieve all of the expense and none of the benefits. Anyone trying to sell you a “new Apollo project” is probably looking to grab the power that comes with controlling that much spending and isn’t too bothered about achieving any of the supposed benefits.

After an earthquake, people climb out from under their protective tables and doorways, look around, and try to make sense of the distorted landscape. After the political tectonics of 2016, Brexit and Trump, people did the same – a mood captured by P.J. O’Rourke in the title of his 2016 election memoir, How the Hell Did This Happen?

It wasn’t just in Britain and the U.S. that the ground moved. Across Europe nationalist parties have come to prominence, gaining power in Hungary and Poland. In France, the nationalists didn’t win but were defeated by Emmanuel Macron, whose En Marche party was only a year old. In Iceland, the Pirate Party, a five-year-old group whose symbol is a skull and crossbones flag, has fired a shot across the bow of the political establishment.

Prior to all of this, the Arab Spring toppled governments or ignited civil war in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen.

Companies, churches, and empires are the solid rocks that society is built on. These solid institutional rocks are floating on a swirling fluid magma of technology.

Different technologies support different institutions. The feudal church supported by swords and scriptoria is very different from the nation state supported by gunpowder and the printing press. Sailing ships support different-shaped empires than railway lines.

The technology layer is fluid, elastic, and constantly shifting. The institutions it supports are heavy, solid, and, ultimately, brittle. Institutions can be built on what look like solid foundations, but those foundations move and can tear apart the very thing they’re supposed to hold up.

In the 1850s telegraph wires bound the British Empire together. During the Indian Rebellion in 1857 the telegraph enabled British troops to communicate better than the rebels and suppress the mutiny. Fifty years later, rapid telegraphic communications enabled the cascade of events that triggered World War I, that unprecedented bonfire of empires.

Gunpowder enabled the formation of large armies of untrained men and hence large states. Gunpowder morphed into high explosives and then into nuclear weapons. States became empires became superpowers. The superpowers’ most powerful weapons are too dangerous to use – nuclear weapons haven’t been used since Nagasaki in 1945 but explosives in the form of Stinger missiles and car bombs or IEDs are now the weapon on choice against superpowers.

Those of us who live on top of geological fault lines have a visceral understanding of plate tectonics. Those of us who live amongst institutions whose technological foundations have moved will become familiar with state tectonics.

Several magmatic currents are tearing at the foundations of our social order. We are living on top of a complex fracture zone.

Social media has democratised propaganda. Where broadcast media once consolidated opinion and allowed the manufacture of consent, social media fragments opinion and enables strife. An Egyptian president of thirty years can be deposed by a hashtag. Fifty gigatons of Soviet warheads did nothing to lessen American power but $200-worth of Russian Facebook ads caused riots in American streets.

The printing press made us all readers, ended five centuries of feudalism, and gave birth to the modern age. Social media makes us all writers, persuaders, and propagandists and will upend the “broad church” political parties that have been at the centre of modern democracy.

Cyberwarfare has given the power to destroy infrastructure to anyone who can download a piece of code. The Wannacry ransomware worm brought British hospitals to their knees. The sort of havoc that used to require an air force is now available to anyone who can Google “EternalBlue”.

Information technology can either give us the tools to distribute and decentralise the electrical grid and make it highly resilient or provide the tools to cut off the lifeblood of civilisation.

Cryptocurrencies threaten the monopoly that governments have on issuing money. Taxation depends on knowing who earns what. Governments balance their books by expanding the supply of paper money. If either of these abilities disappears, everything we know about modern welfare states is up for grabs.

Bitcoin may or not be around in ten years but, either way, money printing and government debt is going to cause a crisis that will change money forever. Whether we end up with gold, IMF Special Drawing Rights, or a novel electronic currency is still to be decided but the existing order won’t last.

Machine learning, 3D printing, and robotics make it possible to manufacture all manner of goods with almost no staff. Where factories used to provide thousands of solid jobs, capital is often now cheaper than labour.

The Luddites tried to reverse the first industrial revolution by smashing weaving looms. History shows that the Luddites were wrong and that the industrial revolution created far more jobs and wealth than it cost. Automation and artificial intelligence will create even vastly more wealth but what will our relationship with the machines look like?

Quakes caused by any of these rifts could be dramatic. Together they’ll reshape the societal landscape like nothing we’ve ever seen and the results are unknowable.

Five hundred years ago, similar forces reshaped Europe in the Reformation. Gunpowder and the printing press reduced city walls to rubble and ended the Church’s monopoly on Biblical interpretation. Both books and firearms were used in service of the Church but the changes they brought about inevitably swept feudalism away. Luther believed he was returning the Church to its origins but unwittingly launched Europe on the path to science and democracy, to secular humanism, via the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War.

The new reformation that we’re embarking on will have equally unknowable results. The question is: how can we survive and prosper through it?

All politics is either
a) talking or
b) fighting.

Therefore information technology and military technology determine everything.

These technologies are constantly shifting but the institutions they support – states, churches, empires, and businesses – have inertia and change very slowly.

When the stresses between the fluid technology layer and the solid institutional layer that sits on top of it get too great, something breaks.

The breaks are not gradual; they are catastrophic.