Hot Type: The Knocking From Below

History shows us that this dark moment for America and the world could be about to get far worse, writes Byline Supplement columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda

In an interview with Dr Marci Shore for my podcast this week, we asked her about the parallels between Ukraine in 2014 and the US in this moment. The author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, said: “I’m completely terrified. I feel like in some ways the past eight years could be subtitled ‘Vindication of a Neurotic Catastrophist’. I did not want to be vindicated in this.”

She said there’s an aphorism in Polish that translates as:

“I found myself at the very bottom, but then I heard knocking from below.”

“I’ve noticed the Russians abbreviate this expression to just ‘knocking from below’ and everyone understands what you mean. You think it couldn’t get any worse and then it does.”

She said historians have an infinite regression problem, because at “any given moment in time, where we are is conditioned by what came before that.”

But as we look at the present moment in America, where a 250-year-old imperfect but ever improving democracy is about to be handed over to an organized crime ring, we have to start somewhere to figure out why it failed.