Reflections on the American Degeneration
an essay of fragments
The American election proved again political punditry is best used to wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips.
Elections are not single events, but produce a single result. What matters is not misreading the mood of the electors, but the decisions and actions of actors empowered by that result. Popular sovereignty is nowhere to be found. Psephology is augury reinvented for political mercenaries. What is decisive is elite action.
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We in the outer reaches of the American Empire need to break free from the American narrative.
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The gerontocratic race for the Whitehouse has already begun. The best the rest of the world can do is to turn this television channel off.
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The post-democratic society is here.
We who live in the mythical place of the West do cherish our status as democracies. We like to celebrate the freedom and the dignity that designation of our political institutions grants us as citizens. We like to denigrate the benighted societies ruled by the “new breed of autocrats” – Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan, Orban and, in some minds, even Trump (surely the most impotent autocrat of all time?). We are too easily lulled into trances by lazy talk from the “Leader of the Free World”, the Pretender President Joe Biden, about “inflection points” in the fate of the world where we must choose whether our best way forward is “autocracy” or the soul of America, democracy. We are free and they are slaves.
But when I look at the actual conditions of our political institutions, culture and actors, especially in the wake of the Great Seclusion of 2020, the response of our governing elites to the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, I see a different drama. In the great coliseum of the city there may be a theatrical performance of democracy combating autocracy, stage managed by manipulative politicians and celebrity journalists. But outside the walls of the circus, in the great feral city of our distressed republics, I see a post-democratic society growing over the ruins of democracy.
I see political institutions that have become empty husks of their great traditions: parliaments filled with time-serving hacks and empty of meaningful debate; political parties unmoored on the social tides and suborned to empty marketing machines; bureaucracies ravaged by political mercenaries and consultants and starved of dignified purpose; universities converted into student shops and stripped of humane ideals; courts conceited with their power to rule and too timid to defend the most powerful resource of the powerless; a fourth estate dazed by its own dim celebrity and confused by reading talking points on teleprompters as truth; a civil society leashed to government and oligarchical patronage and no longer enlisting ordinary people in its little platoons; a citizenry free enough to live outside politics and intimidated enough to live within lies.
This is the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem in this new century. It is not the threat of the “new autocrats” or the “new populists.” Putin, Xi Jinping and the others are not autocrats. Such an idea is pure misinformation fantasy. Donald Trump was never an “existential threat” to American democracy. He saw it was dead, and fantasized he could make it great again. Along the way, he called out many of the oligarchs, hoaxers and deep staters who prowled around the cadaver. Perhaps the “new autocrats” and “new populists” arrived at a post-democratic society first, or at least without the illusion that America equals global freedom equals democracy equals good government equals the end of history. Perhaps we should see their struggle as akin to ours: how to fashion a decent republic in a post-democratic society? A dangerous thought – but in our conditions we must dare to think dangerously.
Democracy as a concept cannot save us from the difficulties, injustices and failures of this new set of political institutions. We would do well to break the spell of democracy, as the English political theorist, John Dunn, has urged us to do. In Breaking Democracy’s Spell, he asked:
“Why does this word democracy now hold such singular political authority? Where is the power that lurks so strangely within it? What exactly is it that modern populations are consenting to when they subject themselves to democracy’s sway?”
Dunn’s response was to say that:
“In essence, democracy is above all a formula for imagining subjection to the power and will of others without sacrificing personal dignity or voluntarily jeopardizing individual or family interests.”
Can we say, after years of masks, lockdowns, seclusions, arrests of dissenters, celebration of some protestors and designation of others as domestic terrorists and conspiracy theorists, Big Tech censorship, Big Media collusion, oligarchical Great Resets, the cancellation of a whole culture – that this formula still keeps our personal dignity safe?
The post-democratic society has arrived. We need to turn away from the old priests and performers who are muttering grand concepts of democracy as a prelude to another circus performance in the decaying coliseum. We need to find our own new way in the feral cities of our distressed republics. There is no easy recourse to live well among friends and strangers in a political community no longer entranced by democracy. But we are all survivors of democracy’s fall, and we may yet find close to home – in our own dignity, ordinary virtue and living in truth – a way to some new decent polity.
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Crypto is a form of parallel polis. It attracts eerily religious followers. They see in its blockchains ”a way out that does not invovle abandoning America” (James Poulos, American Mind podcast). But this way out is an illusion, even a Ponzi scheme. The greatest secret of crypto is that it is just old-fashioned fraud and greed.
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Effective altruism has been exposed by the FTX scandal. It demonstrates that philanthropy is not government, and yet again that markets and the private sphere are not the republic.
FTX scandal follows on the heels of a strangely organised election. It illustrates the American elites ascent into their chosen avatars.
Smart drugs and stimulants have played their part in the illusions of the FTX fiasco - the American disease.
Biden’s pitiful performance at the East Asia summit and the G20 also followed on from the election. The missiles in Poland incident also followed on from the election. How long can this gerontocracy go on staging such a dangerous media-theatre state?
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History dissolves political illusions. Why? History shows politics is never a story of progress and redemption. History showed this to us again in the disappointment of radical conservatives with the ebbing of the ‘Red Wave’. But after the disenchantment, we are free to laugh and to admire.
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Caitlin Johnstone makes a scathing critique of our dysfunctional party system within a framework of manufacturing consent and the manipulation of minds. But it counterposes this with an anarchist information society that does not face the darkest facts of the populist delusion.
Our rulers are like a clever man who captured a baby giant and trained it not to notice how much bigger and stronger it is than him so it wouldn't squash him and escape. We're the giant.
But anarcho-populism is a road to hell. Institutions are the guarantees of freedom and a good life. There is no escape from the responsibility to build enduring institutions.