It is the first of September. Summer is not over, but the days are waning and the leaves are changing color. Soon it will all be over, indeed, it will all be over, as election day is little more than two months away and the nation continues its slide into a shattered visage of its former self. Very soon, we will find out whether the current administration remains in place, free to wreak havoc for another four years, or whether sanity will mount its grand restoration and return us at last to normalcy.
Or at least that's what most commentators want you to think. There are variations on the margins (this is where most variation occurs), but the narrative seems clear. Civil society is broken, dysfunctional, exacerbated by a toxic political culture that just won't quit, indeed, feeds off its own rage and uses it as fuel. But I cannot yet help but think this is nothing more than an unveiling of what was already here. Scenes of burning buildings and bodies in the street alarm those in affluent zip codes, but this is old hat to those tried-and-tested folks in the country who have watched their own prospects crumble around them, their friends and families migrate or fall victim to despair, their lives ruled by addiction and death, left behind by prosperous geographies that snubbed their noses in disdain. A "culture of death", a certain manifesto called it. Now, that culture is spreading like a malignant tumor, an octopus whose tentacles are tightening their grip around the nation's neck. Why not? This is justice. Everyone gets what is theirs. It is unfortunate that so many do not know what they really deserve.
First they came for the inner cities. The ghetto broke, but its people are a resilient bunch, they created new subcultures which emerged stronger, metamorphosing and strengthening itself until it left the nest (and those who birthed it) behind to conquer the world. Then they came for the country. Its inhabitants do not possess the cultural capital that those in the inner-cities do, so they are unable to lay claim to any innovation in countervailing power that is not political. Instead, they sought to dominate politically in order to survive. They succeeded. For now.
The sickness has never gone away. Now it has come for the suburbs and the wider cities. The perpetrators comprise a class that hardly understands itself, let alone anyone else. Even those who purport to study it cannot yet divine its true motivations, however many attempts might be made to do so. But they are certainly the harbingers of a certain kind of self-destruction which has left a number of their own (and their ostensible enemies) dead. The anarchy in the streets is but an unveiling for the world of the anarchy that has reigned everywhere else for the past thirty years.
We are getting our just desserts, no? Movements are springing up like weeds. Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Q-Anon chief among them. Political historians have long been attuned to the readiness with which Americans fall victim to allegedly "conspiratorial" thinking, but conspiracies often have a basis in real fact and sentiments. Would the Anti Masonic party have risen to national power without the murder of William Morgan by Freemasons in the backwoods of New York? Unlikely. Would anti vaccine advocates, Infowars, and Q have attained such sway over the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere without two decades of real elite blunders? Unlikely.
Indeed, the case of Q-Anon points towards a possible, much deserved future. Movement conservatism was born in Sharon, Connecticut, the product of Bill Buckley's upper middle-class gentility and "reason". Its existence, and success, was predicated on its ability to establish itself as a vehicle for serious ideas and policy and on its capacity to present an alternative program for America that was diametrically opposed to that which had monopolized the electorate for three decades under FDR's Democratic Party. To do this, some adjustments at the margins had to be made. The "kooks" that desired to attach themselves to the new liberal conservative coalition would have to be expunged. While this includes the usual suspects, Brent Bozell's papists and the John Birch society, it also included radical egotists like Ayn Rand, who so offended the socially conservative wing of the coalition that a defense of the "permanent things" had to be made in the pages of the National Review.
Movement conservatism had purged itself of its heresies. But its mistake was in believing that in co-opting the Republican Party to its agenda it had monopolized ideological control over its membership. It should have been clear to them, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the rise of talk-radio and Fox News all the way to Donald Trump and Breitbart, that they were the junior partner in the relationship. Parties are amorphous and unwieldy and their memberships are vast. Despite perfunctory exhortations to the notion of the "big-tent", it is clear that they saw themselves as ideological gatekeepers, when in matter of fact they were merely loaning themselves. We can think of another word for "loan", can't we?
This is why the breakdown of party discipline has caught most people flatfooted. The immunological defense that kept the Republican Party from splintering in the past is no more, partly a consequence of its weakened establishment and partly a result of flame-feeding cultural accelerators. A positive-feedback loop is driving people towards ideas that were once unthinkable and which seem downright insane to those of us caught in our ivory towers. Partisan lines have not merely hardened, they are exploding in this era of ubiquitous and instant information transfer. Technology can subvert traditional gatekeepers, and no matter how hard Facebook and Twitter try regain control over their innovation, attempts to quell this incipient public revolt will only serve to increase distrust on the part of those who have accepted seeming-misinformation as truth. The result, funnily enough, is a drift towards national-populism among conservative intellectuals and a widespread embrace of conspiracy on the part of the ostensibly conservative masses.
So the party may well capitulate to its "kooks". But as other movements which have faced the derision of their supposed superiors, it will channel real grievances at an unanswerable, unaccountable and unresponsive elite. It will embrace blatant falsehoods. It will use bombastic and unbelievable rhetoric to justify a hunt for phantoms that may well be real. It will have little to say about ideology, which makes it the perfect vessel of those who have little concern for it. It is not generational, for while the niche-ideologists pontificating on twitter and branding themselves for the consumption of precocious and naive children may see it as a Facebook phenomenon, there are endless masses of other precocious and naive children who see the value in conspiracy and embrace it. I should know. After all, I was once one of them.
It is for this reason that the decline of the conservative movement as it has been constituted since 1960 has ushered in such diverse responses from the electorate and its representatives. While a faction of populist conservatives establish themselves in Congress and a coterie of intellectuals and commentators begin to make the case for an intellectual Trumpism, those who actually vote for these candidates imagine themselves as having very little at stake when it comes to ideological disputations. Whether this is in fact true or not is somewhat irrelevant. The pressure cooker has exploded. The lid has blasted off. The passions can no longer be contained. An intelligent politician will not only accede to them but ride them to power. Quite a few have already done so. If the Republican Party is to become the Q Anon party, then so be it. A scenario as epochal as that could only come about as a result of a politics turned utterly sclerotic. It is such a swift and sudden course-correction that it can only be compared with Constantine's conversion to Christianity. But it is a necessary one. It is catharsis.
One might wonder why I am not speaking about the Democrats. After all, their party seems in thrall to shibboleths that appear increasingly inane. Is Black Lives Matter and Antifa not, after all, the left-wing antipodes to Q Anon? The answer is that while they may be, it doesn't matter, because the Democratic establishment has not been defeated, as Bernie Sanders' twin campaigns make abundantly clear. Democratic socialists have demonstrated they can win office in isolated deep-blue districts, but their appeal is limited beyond that. It is at least conceivable to imagine that the economic shocks brought about by coronavirus will plunge the professional-managerial class into large-scale downward mobility, pushing them to close ranks around a candidate like Elizabeth Warren that is, at the very least, outwardly palatable to the highly educated and affluent voters moving into the party. But it remains to be seen what the outcome of a hypothetical Biden presidency would be and what the long-term ramifications of this pandemic will be. It is simply too soon to say. But with the Democratic establishment hoping to transform the party into the home of Buckley-style "rationalism", I would not pin my hopes on a course correction.
To lean into emotion and grievance does, in fact, produce results. And as we have previously explored, it is possible to ground entire areas of policy on sentiment. Vengeance certainly plays its role here. But it is also more general than that. It is the power of rampant unchecked emotion given space to flourish in the perfect conditions. As Aristotle said, speaking of the passions in his Rhetoric: "They love too much and they hate too much." For those who see the administrative state in exactly the light described above, as a creature of inertia and neglect and subject to meaningless conflict over issues of marginal concern to the lives of those who depend on and despise it in equal measure (something no ideologist in his crystal palace of clear-cut political positioning will ever understand), the notion that paranoiacs at the reins will do a better job of crashing the system than even the intellectuals who lend them their support seems like a safe bet. I would certainly wager on it.
