, Columnist
The World Is Feeling the Angst of Liminality
Will America be a democracy at the end of the year? Will the world be at war? Only Hermes, the god of thresholds, knows.
Hermes points the way.
Photographer: Robert Perry/Getty Images
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The crisis of 2024 “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Symptoms such as extreme polarization, democratic corrosion and neo-fascism in the US and elsewhere, in turn boding conflict, serfdom and war.
Oh, wait. That line above was meant to describe the year 1930. That’s when it appeared in prison notebook number 3, written by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist philosopher in Benito Mussolini’s Italy whom the Fascists jailed until his death in 1937 to shut him up.