To the Finland Station

I’m front paging this very interesting comment from JEC:

We are, I believe, in a crisis — but it’s not a social scientist’s crisis. This one only the historians will be able to explain.

If you look at the sort of things social scientists look at, there’s nothing very special going on. America is more-or-less at peace for the first time since September 11, 2001. America is not undergoing an economic catastrophe: we took the hit of COVID-19 and things have largely returned to “normal.” Reported unemployment is low, inflation is in a normal range, incomes are rising. There’s no particular political realignment going on, nothing remotely comparable to the shift of white southern voters from Democratic to Republican after 1964. (OK, the shift among the college educated away from the GOP might count. But I’m curious to know how much of that is accounted for by economics — a lot of educated support for the GOP came from the correlation between a degree and income. Diminish that correlation and you increase the degree-Democrat correlation.) Even the cultural changes we talk about are happening among Republicans. (Remember when the GOP was the party of “traditional family values?” Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Lauren Boebert don’t. “Ladies don’t get jobs” isn’t really a GOP thing anymore — and it really, really was.)

There’s conflict, of course. But there’s always conflict. Since 1954*, race has been front-and-center in American politics without a break. As for economic division, the golden age of shared prosperity (a) wasn’t and (b) to the extent it was, lasted about 25 years whole years. Not much of an “age.”

I think the reality is that the present crisis — which is a thing — is not really the consequence of big social forces (though they form the background and are, in some sense, enablers). This is a crisis of particulars and unfortunate coincidence.

I first read C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite a bazillion years ago, in college. What struck me most was not the concentration of power in elite groups so much as the concentration of power in the hands of elite individuals — like CEOs and the president. Institutions which place society-bending power into the hands of particular individuals transform the nature of historical change itself. They make the Great Man (or, more commonly, the Great Criminal) theory of history true.

We talk about Donald Trump as being typical of Republicans — and on certain policy issues, it’s correct. But Donald Trump is not normal. He combines a profound, clinical narcissism which would ordinarily be crippling (because it makes him so stupid and so manipulable) with a set of resources (his inheritance) that attracts and finances a coterie of enablers, along with an instinctive compulsion to tell people exactly what they want to hear, and a Hollywood-created mythical identity and aura (a “charism,” if you will), as well as an absolute contempt for the rule of law. We can look to social forces and institutional structures to understand how Donald Trump became possible, but only Donald Trump makes the Donald Trump Crisis happen.

* I’m using Brown v. Board of Ed (1954) to date the breakdown of the Post-Bellum Racist Consensus.

This touches on one of the most fundamental questions in history and social science generally, which is sorting out the respective roles of structural forces and individual agency in the course of human events.

I want to emphasize a couple of powerful biases at work in regard to this question. Popular culture is radically biased toward explanations that depend on the centrality of famous individuals and their choices. No one is going to make a big budget movie called The Economic and Social Determinants of Political Leadership in Post-Revolutionary France. Instead, that movie is going to be called Napoleon. To use the most famous 19th century example, Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory of history is an intellectual defense of this tendency (“The History of the World is but the biography of great men.”)

On the other side of the debate, we have a very powerful if more subtle bias in the opposite direction. Among intellectuals in general there is, I believe, a strong bias toward structural explanations of history, and a sometimes overly dismissive attitude toward accounts that emphasize individual agency. To stick with 19th century examples, two famous advocates for this perspective are Marx and Tolstoy.

So what do we make of Donald Trump in particular, and Trumpism in general, in this regard? Jamelle Bouie:

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election was such a shocking event that for people of a certain cast of mind, Donald Trump is less a politician than a force of history.

To this class of observer, Trump is something like the world spirit made flesh, where the “world spirit” is a global tide of reactionary populism. He may not have ushered in the furious effort to defend existing hierarchies of status and personhood, but he seems to represent its essential qualities, from the farcical incompetence that often undermines its grand intentions to the unrelenting, sometimes violent intensity that has sustained a forward march through failure back toward power.

The upshot of this idea of Trump as a kind of incarnation is that resistance is futile. You can defeat him at the ballot box, you can put him at the mercy of the criminal-legal system, you can even disqualify him under the Constitution, but the spirit endures. Trump or not, goes the argument, we live in an age of grass-roots reaction. Trump is just an avatar. His followers — the forgotten, if not exactly silent, remnant of the nation’s old majority — will find another something.

But Bouie is at least somewhat skeptical of this sort of structuralist account in re Donald Trump, Avatar of the Simulcra:

If nothing else, it is difficult to imagine another Republican politician who would have inspired the same cult of personality as the one that has enveloped Trump during his years on the national stage. It’s no accident that to ensure loyalty or force compliance, followers of the former president have resorted to intimidation and death threats.

If Trump is in a dynamic relationship with the social forces that produced him — if he is both product and producer — then it stands to reason that his absence from the scene, even now, would have some effect on the way those forces express themselves. . . .

If the character of a political movement is forged through contingency — the circumstances of its birth, the context of its growth, the personalities of its leadership — then it matters who sits at the top.

The point, then, is that it would be better to face the challenges to American democracy without a constitutional arsonist at the helm of one of our two major political parties. A world in which Trump cannot hold office is not necessarily a normal one, but it is one where the danger is a little less acute.

My views on this question have shifted somewhat in the eight and a half years since I first foresaw our current calamity, and now I’m more inclined toward the perspective put forward by JEC and Bouie. Yes Trump is both cause and effect, both symptom and disease, but he is, in terms of his specific character and background and perverse talents, a crucial independent factor in the birth of the various proto-fascist beasts slouching toward America.

Trump is a cancer that needs to be excised from the body politic: an operation that is a necessary though not sufficient condition for beginning to cure the sickness unto death that enervates this nation.