Political settlements shift from impossible to inevitable through historical reversal

Evidence

Going back to what I was saying earlier on: We should be inspired to the extent to which the triumph of neoliberalism, in a way, is showing how things can go from impossible to inevitable. That’s the way history goes — that things seem completely off the agenda, that there’s no way that things can happen; suddenly, things switch where they’re the only thing that can happen. That’s how it was with neoliberalism. … The one thing we can be sure of at the moment is that things can’t go back to how they were before 2008. That can’t happen. We’re in a period of major tumult, major change. The right, the kind of neoliberal right, is at its weakest since I can remember. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2153

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes the accelerationist / CCRU line of thought Fisher was developing with Alex Williams — the notion that the left must learn from how the right won the battle of ideas and flipped the Overton window. — connects to: Institutions once deemed inevitable became unthinkable through political struggle — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 57; Enclosure of common resources has repeatedly been reversed historically. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 284; Contingency of historical conjunctures is a precondition for political possibility (+3 more)
• SEED: This framing (impossible-to-inevitable as a technology of political change) is the seed of an essay on how the left historically won its own impossible-to-inevitable reversals — abolition of slavery, votes for women, same-sex marriage.

Broader Connections

• Institutions once deemed inevitable became unthinkable through political struggle #corroborates (0.85) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 57
• Contingency of historical conjunctures is a precondition for political possibility #corroborates (0.80)
• Exogenous political shifts, not internal lock-in, can dissolve institutional legitimacy. #expands (0.78) — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 311
• Enclosure of common resources has repeatedly been reversed historically. #exemplifies (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 284
• Historical events result from contingent decisions that could have gone otherwise #expands (0.75) — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 116
• Political systems are transient whereas civilizations endure across millennia. #corroborates (0.75) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 116