When you connect the dots," Wolf wrote, it all made sense. The crackdowns on OWS were "the first battle in a civil war … It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent." This, Wolf declared, marked a definitive tip into totalitarian rule—a claim that she had made before, under George W. Bush, confidently predicting he would not allow the 2008 election to take place (he did), and that she would make many more times in the years to come. "Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square," she wrote. "Like them, our own national leaders … are now making war upon us."

QUESTION: What explains the persistent attraction to such apocalyptic predictions despite repeated failures? XREF: Connects to broader analyses of prediction failures among public intellectuals and political commentators.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 54