History may be written by the victors, but it is edited by the survivors. Almost four years ago, on the 21st of January, 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to accept the presidency of the United States, sleep-deprived commentators started to wonder out loud where all the time travelers were when we needed them. Surely we were at the point in the movie where a frantic stranger with futuristic weapons is supposed to show up to stop us all from heading down the wrong trouser leg of time?
Something had gone wrong. It wasn’t meant to turn out like this. In Washington, DC, I waited with thousands of shell-shocked reporters and saucer-eyed Christian fundamentalists on the freezing National Mall as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” a song for and about pathological narcissists, played again and again on the speaker system.
Trump took office. I spent some of the next 24 hours crouched behind a bollard as armed police fired tear gas into a crowd of protesters. No time travelers turned up to stop it. We would have to sort this out ourselves.
How many times, over the course of this year, suspended between possible futures, wrangling schedules with faraway friends and colleagues, have we thrown up our hands and apologized because time has no meaning anymore?
We didn’t arrive at this meme in an arbitrary way. Time does, actually, feel different right now. Billions of people have been gnawing their fingers for months, waiting for the immediate future to become comprehensible again. It’s not just the big, collective worries—elections, trade treaties, global health—that are yet to be resolved. Individual futures are also being erased. Weddings are canceled, savings wiped out, graduations and holidays and reunions postponed indefinitely. We move out of cities with no notion of when we will return. We go to work not knowing if those jobs will exist next month. The usual ways we understand time and come to terms with change are too flimsy to withstand the avalanche of possible futures collapsing all around us.
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It can feel, sometimes, like we’re stuck in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder.” The 1952 short story is, according to literary historians, where the phrase “the butterfly effect” comes from. In it, a group of big-game hunters go on a time safari to bag a T. rex. They’re not supposed to step off the path, not supposed to change a single thing, but they do—and when they return to their present, one of them finds a butterfly crushed on the sole of his shoe. That’s enough to change everything: because something is different about the time they have come back to.
That something is fascism. Before they time traveled, a fascist candidate had just been defeated in a presidential election. When they come back, the fascist is in charge.
Fascism is always, apparently, the alternative future struggling to be born. In November, 2020, 70 million people voted to reelect Donald Trump. He is now openly seeking to undermine democracy to steal back the election he lost. We’re still stuck, it seems, in the dark timeline that the triumph of liberal democracy was supposed to protect us from. The timeline where the heroes don’t turn up in time to stop the bad guys taking over, the virus from spreading, the seas from boiling. This is the way the world ends—not with a bang but a set of clichés that make it all feel horribly redolent of big-budget fever dreams about stormtroopers and jackboots, when the military police finally come to drag the activists away.
It is not possible to predict the future by reading stories, but it is possible to describe the present. The nightmares of an age, its terrors and secret ambitions, seep out of the collective unconscious in storytelling. There are repeating patterns, questions that get posed again and again, themes that become clearer and more unsubtle the more often they are rehearsed.
An extraordinary number of recent novels, films, and shows center on a hero who has to go to the past to save the future, usually from utter destruction. Often this involves glimpsing—or living in—an alternate timeline, one in which a single significant change has been made. Pop culture is soaked in iterations of this story; literature keeps coming back to it. It’s the principle behind franchises like Terminator, Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes, Bill and Ted, and Doctor Who. It’s the device that drives blockbusters like Looper, Dog Day Afternoon, Groundhog Day, and Avengers: Assemble. It even crops up in Harry Potter. Most of these stories serve up versions of the message that we’re already living in the best possible timeline, and that we shouldn’t meddle in the past, lest we find ourselves mugged in memory lane. Like trauma survivors returning again and again to the memory of danger, trying to comprehend how and why they survived, we revisit events in history to reassure ourselves that we did the right thing.
The fundamental questions of time travel stories are moral and spiritual, not scientific. They are questions about ethics, moral choices, and free will. What’s fascinating is that there are two major what-ifs that are by far the most common historical inflection points—two points in time that we keep returning to again and again to ask what might have happened if things had been different. One is the American Civil War. (Of course, science-fiction writers and filmmakers are far from the only people preoccupied with that particular question—white Americans have spent a century and a half trying to rewrite the history of the 1860s with themselves as the heroes.) The other, and even more popular, is the Second World War.
The first known alternate-timeline novel that imagines an undefeated Nazi empire was written in the middle of it, in 1936, by the British author Katherine Burdekin. Much more recently, there’s been Amazon’s take on Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and a big-budget adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Kate Atkinson’s popular Life After Life novels follow one woman’s journey to find a thread of her own life that allows her to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Any number of other awful things could happen to the world, but fascism, and specifically an alternate Nazi future, is the one that haunts all our nightmares.
Dark is the exception that proves the rule. The Netflix show, now in its third season, is intricate, intimate, and exquisitely German—a Vorsprung durch Technik of narrative design, a recursive series of time loops in a small town where everyone turns out to be everyone else’s secret grandmother and the frequent digressions into Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return are actually plot-relevant. Doors to the past open every 33 years, which means the story gets to skip over the period between 1921 and 1953, during which quite a lot happened in Germany.
This is not a cop-out. It’s just that the makers and actors of this show come from the one country where “‘What if fascism won?” is neither an abstract thought exercise nor an interesting question. We know what happened. A lot of people died. A lot of futures were foreclosed. And the victors of that war decided that liberal democracy had triumphed, that fascism was dead forever.
In “On the Concept of History,” written in Paris in early 1940, Walter Benjamin talked about the “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.” Benjamin said that the shock comes, in large part, from the popular conviction—still current today—that the arc of history bends naturally toward justice, that the human race is on an unremitting escalator of progress. “One reason why Fascism has a chance,” he wrote, “is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm … [but] the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Even as we tell ourselves that fascism has been conquered, it remains our shadow, our dark future that’s always just one squashed butterfly away.
There is no word in English for the precise sensation of history holding its breath, but after a year of plague and insurrection and electoral uncertainty, most of us know how it feels. The word Benjamin uses, in his paper on history, is Jetztzeit. The literal translation is “here and now,” but it means more than that. Benjamin describes this sort of moment as the time when history is truly changeable, when the present stalks the future like a tiger hunting its prey, all bunched muscle and stored energy, ready to pounce. It’s useful to remember that when he wrote about history, in 1940, Walter Benjamin was a refugee, trying to find a way to escape Nazi-occupied Europe, where Jews like him were being hunted down and murdered. To us, that period of history seems fixed. But those who had to live through it had no idea what would come next.
We speak of the Before Times as if there was a single moment when we could have chosen not to disappear down the wrong trouser leg of history. In fact, it takes a lot more than a squashed butterfly, a stray bullet, or even a stolen election to make modern fascism happen. We cannot get to the After Times without acknowledging that, yes, mistakes have been made, that there is a sadistic kink in the arc of history, that the world has changed for the worse—and that that did not happen overnight. In fact, a great many people have been living through the Worst Timeline for many generations.
In the last year, not one but two high-profile HBO shows have taken us back in time to the Tulsa race riots of 1921. In the episode “Rewind 1921” of Lovecraft Country, our heroes visit the night when Oklahoma police gave the green light to white supremacists to slaughter their neighbors. In Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, Regina King’s Angela Abar physically experiences the memories of her grandparents who survived the massacre—science fiction putting flesh on the notion that we carry the story trauma of our ancestors in our bodies, outrages that refuse to be buried no matter how hard they are scrubbed from the official record.
But we don’t need to go back in time to change history. We simply need to remember it properly. This summer, as statues of Confederate generals were torn down across the United States, Black Lives Matter protesters were accused of trying to erase history. But those monuments were barely half a century old. Many had been erected during the Civil Rights Era, when white America was anxious to revise its own recent history.
History is never just about what happened. It is about whose stories we strike from the record and whose we choose to cast in bronze. The word monument comes from the Latin monere, meaning “to warn.” Statues of Great Men are not just mementos, they are warnings from the past—including to those who might be tempted to question their greatness.
In the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, time travelers really did turn up to try to save the world from the Worst Timeline. I meet those time travelers every day. They don’t have access to convenient wormholes, jerry-rigged Deloreans, or magic phone boxes, so they have to use less flashy technology to salvage the essential truths that have been buried in the past. They have to organize and agitate and tell and retell the stories of abuse and oppression, structural violence, and civil injustice. And that work is ongoing.
There are times when the future feels like a spun coin trembling on its edge. In the After Times, and there will be after times, it will be vital to remember not just what almost happened, but what already did. The stories we choose to tell about these years matter. If we have survived, it was not by accident. The damage done to democracy around the world is as permanent as the ash pumped into the atmosphere, the poison pouring into our politics, the lives lost to violence, police brutality, domestic extremism, pointless poverty, and a plague our incompetent leaders allowed to spread. Not everyone is allowed to escape the dark future. Walter Benjamin did not escape. After failing to escape Nazi-occupied France, he swallowed all of his remaining laudanum, alone in his hotel room. His friend and fellow traveler, the radical novelist Arthur Koestler, took an overdose. Koestler survived and made it to America, and lived to see Hitler’s downfall and the beginning of the nuclear age. Benjamin died that night. He never got to see what happened next.
In the After Times, there will be a temptation to forget that not everyone was saved. That there are many possible timelines, and we might still not be living in the best one. It will be painful and shameful to remember what we have collectively been through—but avoiding that shame and pain is precisely how we got here in the first place.