Dystopia Now!

Jerry Brown is right about us journalists.

We love dystopia.

For those who don’t know, the word is defined by Merriam Webster as “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.”

Our kind of place.

Of course, it’s imaginary, so no such place exists. But what would it look like?

It’d probably be a society blessed with advantages, but doesn’t live up to its opportunity.

A rich society that cuts the benefits upon which poor depend. The sort of place where the people who make the cuts say such things have to be done, if we’re going to be realistic.

It might be the sort of place where people fail to preserve institutions of higher learning, and limit access to them, in order to save money for today. Where the government seeks to build shiny new trains that the rich could ride, while cutting bus service that working people use to get around.

It would be the sort of place with persistent economic distress and fear – and where leaders take little action to do much about it.

This place might have elections, but the results wouldn’t matter much. Rules made by previous regimes and previous voters would be locked in and immovable, impervious to democratic action.

And in such a place, when politicians wanted something, they’d issue bleak warnings about the impact of not going along with their plans.

Leaders might even make exaggerated claims that their critics are really trying to drag the place down.

This is the sort of thing we love.

Because we dystopia.

And we love Jerry Brown.