Seventy years ago, a group of scientists concerned about the danger hanging over the world in the wake of the first use of nuclear weapons created the Doomsday Clock. On that first day, the clock was set at seven minutes before midnight. Since then, the clock has been moved back as far as 17 minutes before midnight just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it’s been creeping ever closer to the witching hour in the last two decades. In 2017, the Atomic Scientists pushed the clock to just two and half minutes before midnight—representing the greatest level of risk since 1953.
The Doomsday Clock provides a reminder of a danger that, horribly enough, has become such a constant in our lives that few people even notice. Most people alive today have lived their whole lives with a nuclear gun pointed at their head. It’s become normal.
Now we’re in an extraordinary era when, though it seemed the nation and the world were moving forward, many nations—and particularly the United States—are facing an unexpected wave of white nationalism allied with a centralized corporatism that threatens to replace liberal democracy with a form of government that would be immediately recognizable to anyone in the 1930s. There’s a real danger that we can reach a position where that transformation can’t be easily reversed.
As a reminder that this is not in any sense “normal,” the Fascist Watch is aimed at providing a visual shorthand for the peril that America faces under conditions that are far outside the usual swings between “left” and “right.” The value that it indicates is subjective based on a combination of recent events and reflects the combined judgement of a number of people looking at issues such as how pressure on the free press and the threatened end of net neutrality suggests control over mass media, or how suppressing scientific research and staffing advisory panels with corporate leaders values profit over both science and public health, or how the Justice Department is being reformed into an organization that fights to increase the power of the powerful.
Expect the Watch to reappear from time to time, in response to national events. The minute hand may move closer to midnight when Republicans determine that sexual assault is an acceptable exchange for holding onto power. It may spin a bit in the hopeful direction when … something good happens.
But watch for the Watch … and don’t let seven minutes before midnight become the new normal.