It's now OK to breathe a sigh of relief. Two significant hurdles are now passed. Civilisation can now develop unimpeded into the future.With the reelection of Barack Obama the rising forces of reaction have been smacked back down into their corner of disrepute. Xi Jinping will lead China back to its rightful place amongst the world's cultures.
Remember back in 2007, the feeling of anticipation and hope engendered by the defeat of the fowl illegitimate Howard government to the young, unaligned Kevin Rudd. Then in 2008 Obama rode the wave of disgust with the illegitimate Bush regime into the White house. Fresh faces of youth and vigour. Surely we could make some changes, some progress towards a better future. How swiftly the forces of conservatism reacted. The knifing of Rudd by the right faction reestablishing it's control with a coincidental shift to the right in the opposition with the replacement of the centre moderate Turnbull with the extreme right Abbott. Then the half-term congressional elections in the US saw the capture of the house of representatives by the republicans in the form of extreme right tea party candidates. Since then progress has been slow in both countries due to the obstruction of these reactionary forces. The speed of these processes has been astounding, indeed I would call them breath-taking. In the space of little more than a couple of years reaction to a progressive move brought progress to a snails pace.
Two hundred years ago similar events shaped the world. The defeat of Napoleon produced the reactionary Congress of Vienna which reestablished the old national boundaries and the old monarchical regimes, forcing the radical forces underground, leading to the wave of revolutions through the continent in the middle of the century, the eventual unification and rise of Germany, the forty-year-World-War-with-a-twenty-year-breathing-space to put her back in her place, and finally the geopolitical arrangement we have in the west today. The point being that in the nineteenth century this process of progress-reaction took fifty years to complete a cycle. This last one took two years. The power of the IT revolution to compress time and make everything go faster is clearly demonstrated here.
The next hurdle will be the upcoming election here in Australia. A step to the right will be a step backwards into a divided society with interest groups being played against each other to influence elections as John Howard was adept at. It will be iteresting to see if Abbott can come up with another trisylabic parot slogan like RAWK-carbon-tax to attempt to scare a presumed ignorant electorate.