Pre-exhaustion
In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, James Meek assesses a book about how civil wars start by international relations professor Barbara F. Walter. Her subject, as Meek describes it, is "nativist traditionalism vs. liberal idealism" and how the tensions between these political tendencies becomes most acute when democracies slide into "anocracy": a democracy with authoritarian characteristics, riven by the emergence of "superfactions" led by reactionary "ethic entrepreneurs" who promise to forestall societal change. Meek quotes this pointed passage from Walter's book:
People may tolerate years of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. They may accept shoddy schools, poor hospitals and neglected infrastructure. But there is one thing they will not tolerate: losing status in a place they believe is theirs. In the 21st century, the most dangerous factions are once-dominant groups facing decline.
In the U.S., of course, people have tolerated decades of mass shootings and the particular vulnerability of schoolchildren to them, in part because guns serve the symbolic function of perpetuating an established white-supremacist order. (Gun control is repeatedly thwarted because a minority of white people accept the ideology that firearms protect them against "the bad guys" and against the possibility that the state might work toward desegregation or otherwise reducing the grotesque levels of racially inflected inequality.) Judging by online reaction to the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Americans will continue to tolerate it, as though there were no alternative. This can be seen in the exasperated social media posts that anticipate all the familiar pleas and arguments that are recycled after each incident, "memes" drawn from what Jay Caspian Kang calls the "museum of unbearable sorrow":
We see the Onion headline, “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” We see the tweet, “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” We see statistics about N.R.A. campaign contributions; references to the effectiveness of Australia’s National Firearms Agreement, signed in the aftermath of a mass shooting there that killed 35 people; and polls about the popularity of gun control measures in the U.S.
Osita Nwanevu made a similar point on Twitter: "RT the Onion piece. Scroll. RT the Garry Wills piece. Scroll. RT your favorite Democratic politician. Scroll. QT a "thoughts and prayers" tweet. Scroll."
But why do people feel compelled to post that there is nothing appropriate or efficacious to post? Are they trying to talk other people out of following their lead and making their own useless posts? As with virtually every issue, it seems as though there is a gridlocked set of takes that have pre-exhausted the field of political discourse and which can now only be rehearsed again with every entirely predictable reiteration of the underlying problem. It's as if the "end of novelty" and "retromania" that cultural critics occasionally moan about has fully inhabited politics in erstwhile liberal democracies. We can now add to the familiar memes the "I can anticipate all the memes" meme, the "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired" gesture that commentators feel obliged to make, knowing that it is pre-understood as nothing but a gesture.
This is perhaps what the slide into "anocracy" looks like from the social media vantage point. It can seem like a safe enough pedestal, a place where the bystander effect can have the guilt narrated out of it. The near total loss of faith in democratic rule translates into a sense that all anyone can do is make posts about their feelings of impotence. "Our response to these unthinkable tragedies almost feels reflexive at this point, rather than rooted in any actual belief that things can change," Kang writes, speaking for a "we" that must be identified, in Walter's terms, with "liberal idealism" rather than "nativist traditionalism." "It is crucial that we, as a society, don’t allow ourselves simply to accept these deaths," Kang concludes, "but for the life of me, I can’t come up with a single reason this time will be different."
On the other side, "nativist traditionalists" appear to have long reconciled themselves to the idea that lives will be sacrificed to their ideals. Politicians from their faction don't bemoan their own impotence; they have instead recognized how the U.S. constitution was designed to protect minority rule and patiently endeavored to extend those advantages, using obstruction to the point where the will of their opponents to engage politically is depleted into irrelevance.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Walter argues that "when a country moves into the anocracy zone, the risk of political violence reaches its peak; citizens feel uncertain about their government’s power and legitimacy." That seems to track: As a particular ruling order begins to plainly fail, a new order will be established through extralegal means. But Walter then appends this, as though it were a warning: "Compared with democracies, anocracies with more democratic than autocratic features are three times more likely to experience political instability or civil war." Might that suggest civil war is not simply regrettable "instability" but also at times a concerted effort to fight for a democracy people have experienced as real and important in the face of rising autocratic elements before it is too late?
Reactionaries are already using the existing system to their advantage. They don't need to declare war against it; they are already winning. As Meek puts it, "If it is a real danger that civil war may threaten democracy, it is also a real danger that democracy may die because its defenders refuse to start one." He lays out a plausible scenario in which Trump in 2024 turns a loss into a win by legalistic means, perhaps by way of Republican-controlled statehouses putting up their own sets of electors in defiance of vote counts.
Without any bloodshed or violence, without any seeming change in the smooth running of traffic signals and ATMs and supermarkets, without, even, an immediate wave of arrests or a clampdown on free speech, your country is run by somebody who took power illegally. Something must be done! But what, apart from venting on social media? And by whom? Me?
In the wake of the bloodshed and violence of the Uvalde shooting, Alex Pareene sounded a similar note.
I know most of the complex logistical, legal, cultural, and political reasons why our system is incapable of preventing this. I leave those explanations to other authors. I ask instead what anyone with power in this country — a group that has intentionally excluded young people from its ranks —plans to do about those reasons. And I invite the reader to think about the implications of the fact that those people with power cannot answer my question with anything remotely credible. What are you going to do about the fact that we all know you can’t do anything?
There is some ambiguity in that last sentence about who "you" refers to. There are the gerontocratic Democrats that we know won't do anything, but then there are the readers like me, who eventually will have to decide what they are going to do.