A storm in the distance
September 2023
Monsoon season is usually a saving grace from the summer heat in Phoenix. Thunder and lighting and rain to break up the monotony of the glaring sun.
Not this summer.
They say it’s hard to forecast monsoon storms, but this summer follows a pattern where wet winters can lead to dry summers.
Even when a hurricane was drenching Southern California, we got barely a sprinkle of rain in my neighborhood in Phoenix.
A monsoon storm finally hit at the end of August.
Early in the evening on Thursday, August 31st, lightning flashed across the sky. Gusts of wind knocked down trees and power lines in some areas. Later that night, a healthy downpour of rain fell across the Valley.
It was an awesome showing, more memorable due its rarity this summer.
One of the challenges to living life in America in the year 2023 is the unsettling feeling of instability.
A country song speaking to a modern sense of dissatisfaction recently went viral on the internet. It was the subject of some political drama and controversy, as it was claimed by the populist right before the artist emphasized that he does not support either political party.
The song depicts our nation as one controlled by greedy politicians doing nothing but kicking down ordinary folks. It laments that hard-working people are living lives of despair.
Lord, it’s a damn shame, What the world’s gotten to, For people like me and people like you, Wish I could just wake up and it not be true, But it is, oh it is
Any way you slice it, the song is a downer — a sad anthem about life in these United States.
In response to these kinds of downer sentiments, you sometimes hear people offer a perspective check: Don’t you realize we live in one of the most prosperous and peaceful times in all of human history? Never has it been better, materially, to be a human being on this Earth. If you want to complain about life today, maybe you don’t understand how bad it was throughout most of human history when life was nasty, brutish, and short.
This is a smart response and I agree with it, but I think it misses the emotional alienation that pervades in the age of advertising and social media and political nihilism.
It’s harder to find purpose and meaning in the world today, and it’s easier to exploit people’s feelings of alienation for selfish and malicious ends.
Earlier this summer I read a book on Roman history called The Storm Before The Storm, which zooms into the “bloody battles, political machinations, and human drama that set the stage for the fall of the Roman Republic.”
During the generations before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the political players in Rome still felt the need to walk through the motions of civil law and at least pretend to be upholding the principles of the Republic — even as civil norms were being shattered one after the other.
In hindsight, the storm before the storm was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.
As external and internal conflicts intensified, as principles were finally abandoned, political order turned to chaos and the situation was ripe for an authoritarian power grab.
Some observers look at the United States right now and see a similar unraveling.
Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan looks at the current political context — including the actions of the former president, the criminal indictments of the former president, and the reactions to those indictments — and concludes that Liberal Democracy is in the ICU.
Future historians, he says, may conclude that the “extinction-level event” for liberal democracy has already happened.
Maybe there was a time when we could have moved on, found a Republican who could channel justified resentments without destroying the entire system, or found a Democrat young and talented enough to change the atmosphere. Maybe Biden could have sought the cultural center, instead of backing his party’s extremists.
But that time is past, Sullivan says, which leads us to a “looming showdown” between the liberal democratic order and the alternative, which would be bleak.
Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers once explained why he stood up to defend the democratic order. He said he didn’t want to see us return to what it was like before the Enlightenment: “Rhetoric ruled in those times, much more powerfully than truth.”
If future historians find a way to excavate the archives of social media and cable news, they might conclude that by 2023 we had already returned to the dark ages.
The shitstorm before the storm.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1776. He sought to inspire patriots to join the cause against the British monarchy:
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Back in 1776, the patriots sought to overthrow British rule and establish an independent republic. It was a daunting physical and intellectual challenge.
Today, the task is to maintain a democratic order that has survived for over two hundred years. The democratic order is scarred and bloated and somewhat broken, but we still have self-government. We can still choose our representatives. We can still build consensus and enact reforms.
It’s hard to diagnose the core problem today, but I would describe it like this: Political nihilists want to sow chaos and confusion. Their main weapon is a firehose of emotional excitement and disinformation. The goal is not necessarily to convince people of anything specific, but to exhaust ordinary people into giving up on even trying to figure out the truth.1
For example:
It takes ten minutes to invent a crackpot conspiracy theory about how our elections are rigged. It takes one minute for a right-wing influencer to write a tweet promoting the theory. It takes less than two seconds for someone to see the tweet and click “retweet.”
To debunk the crackpot theory, one must take time to research the facts and explain the context. While someone is taking time to debunk one crackpot theory, a thousand new ridiculous lies have popped up, and the next thing you know the Cyber Ninjas are thumbing through ballots at the Coliseum using UV lights to check for invisible ink.
In this space of exhausting chaos, with “normal” politicians pressured to conform to the political extremes, the seeds of authoritarianism are planted.
The crisis we face today is moral and psychological. It is a test of endurance.
The challenge is to hear a drumbeat of warped and inverted patriotism, and not lose appreciation for the civic ideals that Americans have strived to uphold for generations.
The challenge is to hear Christian nationalists warp and invert the message of Jesus, and not become jaded on the idea of agape love.
The challenge is to oppose political illiberalism on the other side without ignoring, excusing, or endorsing the illiberal currents on your own side.
Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge explores this diagnosis in greater depth. Rauch spoke at an ASU-SCETL event in November of 2021. I attended the talk and wrote about it here: In Defense of Reality.