Spencer Critchley

Communication and Change

sedition

The State of Democracy: An Online Discussion

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I thought I’d try having an “Ask Anything” discussion on Zoom, focused on what’s happened to our democracy and what we might be coming next. I think it worked out really well, with great questions and ideas from the participants, and plan to do it again. Here it is:

Excerpt:

[The behavior of Republican elected officials] is a massive failure of character, is the short answer.

And politics is always different from ordinary life because these people are elected to represent their districts, and sometimes that means they go along with things that they don’t personally agree with. But if you think about it, there’s a legitimate way for that to happen, because they are supposed to be representatives of the voters who put them there — not just doing what they personally think is the right thing — and the challenge of being an ethical politician is balancing those two things. So you have to represent your voters.

But you have to do it without betraying your core principles. Where I think this crosses the line is actually, I think, fairly clear. It’s just that we’ve lost the ability to talk about morality with clarity.

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The Revolution Reenacters

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The Capitol rioters and their supporters seem to think they’re reenacting the American Revolution. They’re about as close to the real thing as Civil War reenacters are.

The Gadsden Flag: "Don't tread on me."
Christopher Gadsden (1724–1805), Lexicon, Vikrum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Actually, strike that. I understand many Civil War reenacters are careful students of American history.

The Revolution reenacters don’t seem to know much of anything about American history, beyond what fits on the Gadsden flag. And even that they misunderstand. The “me” in “Don’t tread on me” meant the united colonies, not the lone “me” at the center of the narcissist’s universe.

Neither do they show much understanding of the conservatism they claim to believe in. Conservatism advocates individual liberty, but it must be “ordered,” so as to protect the other individuals who make up a society. As conservative forefather John Stuart Mill prescribed in his classic On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

That’s very different from unbounded selfishness.

And so with the Constitution they supposedly revere. It was designed to promote both private and public freedom, both the “Blessings of Liberty” and the “General Welfare.” Getting that point only requires reading the first paragraph:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And the Second Amendment to that Constitution? While gun control advocates may be disappointed to hear that the Founders did recognize the right to bear arms as a crucial guarantor of liberty, the Second Amendment’s phrase “well-regulated militia” was crucial. In no way did the Founders think everyone had an unregulated right to guns. An excellent, unbiased source on this is A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origin of Gun Control in America, by Saul Cornell — as is any open-minded study of primary sources. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 29:

If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security.

But no, the reenacters don’t understand such things, or simply don’t believe in them.

The real Revolutionaries fought a monarch to establish a democracy. The Revolution reenacters fight democracy to establish a monarch.

The democracy born of the real Revolution was based on equality, and it defeated an uprising by slave-owners.

The Revolution reenacters wave the Confederate flag with their Gadsen flag.

It’s time for them to take off their “patriotic” costumes.

They aren’t reenacting the Revolution, they’re attacking it.

They thought they were in a movie.

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Mob at the US Capitol watches Trump on a giant screen. photo by Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons
Photo by Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons

The Capitol insurrectionists had to riot one-handed — because they needed the other hand to hold up their smart phones, so they could shoot the movie.

It didn’t occur to them that they were also recording evidence of their crimes, and that this evidence would be used at their trials.

Just like it didn’t occur to their leader in the White House, who has committed so many crimes on-camera, up to and including the crime of inciting the Capitol riot.

Because it’s all a movie.

We’ve never fully appreciated how vulnerable our minds are to images on screens, even after decades of those images shaping our culture and even our beliefs, the way divinities used to.

Rudolf Valentino was the first performer to be called a screen idol — and the term was entirely apt. After Valentino died, millions of devoted fans were not just sad, they were distraught, staging massive demonstrations of their grief. Some reportedly committed suicide.

Valentino was just the first in a long line, culminating in a president with no qualifications, or qualities, apart from being famous. Celebrities replaced the gods and god-anointed aristocrats that had been banished by Enlightenment science, which had also made mass media possible.

Now, in our media-saturated, entertainment-obsessed culture, to become a celebrity is the goal to which our fondest dreams lead. To live onscreen is our definition of the good life. It’s heaven. And like heaven, it’s also a way of denying death, a Susan Sontag might point out, if she were still here.*

Much of our moral philosophy is now a junkyard of catch phrases from movies, TV shows, pop songs, and ads: “Trust your heart,” “If you can dream it, you can be it,” “Don’t let anyone tell you no,” “You deserve this,” etc., etc.

In the idolatrous but much more entertaining version of Christianity that televangelism has given us, Jesus wants you to be rich and famous. The eye of the needle is now a mile wide — especially if you’re armed, which he also wants for you. This is an action movie we’re talking about here.

And if we truly believe, and are very lucky, one day…

We’ll be famous.

Maybe even in a starring role in The Attack on the Capitol.

Or one of the sequels, in production now.

*As Sontag wrote in On Photography:

All photographs are memento mori…

It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form…

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Yes, There Is Something You Can Do to Save Democracy

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I often hear from people who say they feel helpless to do anything about the crisis threatening our democracy. They’re just hoping it will end soon.

The trouble is, if they don’t do something, the crisis won’t end. It will get worse.

U.S. Capitol at dusk
Photo: Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Luckily, they’re wrong about being helpless. Each of us has the power, and the duty, to defend democracy simply by standing within its circle.

In a healthy democracy, political disagreements should not be moral, but that doesn’t mean morality doesn’t matter. A healthy democracy operates within a circle of moral values.

Within that circle, no matter what our individual religions or secular philosophies, all of us must agree about fundamental beliefs. These include belief in equality, freedom, the rule of law, and support for democracy itself.

It’s not possible to betray any or all of those beliefs and remain within the circle of democracy.

People who continue to support Trump — and an armed attack on democracy based on the lies of this corrupt autocrat — are outside the circle: they have made themselves exiles.

They need to know that.

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No, We Can’t Just Move On

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Capitol riot
Capitol riot photo by TapTheForwardAssist, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

No, we can’t just move on and put this behind us. It’s not “divisive” to talk about what’s happened. It’s essential.

The coup attempt — still ongoing — forces us into a long-delayed moral reckoning.

When democracy is working, we should be able to have strong political differences without judging each other morally — but that’s because democracy only works when our differences stay within the boundaries of morality. In a democracy, there’s no legitimate position that justifies corruption, bigotry, or cruelty, for example. Those things can’t be a matter of opinion; they’re immoral.

And there’s no legitimate position that justifies an attack on democracy itself, such as we saw most violently last week, but which has been mustering for a long time.

Where Trumpism could lead has been the subject of increasingly urgent warnings since Trump announced his candidacy — and long before that. Trump didn’t come from nowhere.

And now here we are, with our democracy in danger and lives lost.

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