Democratic Thinking: The Death of Normality
In the time of Trump, it is easy to lose touch with our best values and our best selves. (Part 2 of a series.)
We are now living out the fears of our country’s founders. Since 2015, when Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower, we have been living alternative history, the history that should have never happened. We usually explore alternative history in fiction like MacKinley Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
Since 2015, we haven’t been reading alternative history. We’ve been living it. Donald Trump, the wanna-be-dictator, who replaced Hitler’s funny mustache with a bad combover, should not have been elected. He should never have even been the nominee of a major political party.
History has gone awry. Our institutions have been tested. They have been damaged, but have held, for the most part. Our character has also been tested, but we have certainly been changed, not for the better.
As is clear in The Federalist Papers, our founders had a dark view of humanity. From reading history, they knew that our better nature often succumbs to power and greed. Madisonian democracy, the balance of powers built into our constitution, is an acknowledgment of this dark side of humanity. It is a structural means of mitigating the danger of a potential tyrant. The founders placed their faith in institutions.
Our institutions, as history has shown us, develop norms slowly. The freedom of speech “guaranteed” in the Second Amendment was arguably not fully realized until it was tested during the Nixon administration with the publication of The Pentagon Papers. Once developed, our norms depend on citizens of good character who act in good faith and a functional judiciary. Many of the norms of our institutions have taken two and a half centuries to develop. As we have witnessed, they can be damaged, maybe beyond repair, within a few months.
This was one of Walt Whitman’s central concerns as he wrote Democratic Vistas. He argued that people had to develop the knowledge and character needed to participate fully in a democracy. We would not have a true democracy, Whitman wrote, until we had citizens capable of participating in it and maintaining it.
As we have lived in alternative history for over eight years, we have come perilously close to losing our sense of what is normal. Many Americans, even including those who profess to be deeply religious, have supported a leader who violates the fundamental values of our democracy, even the fundamental values of most religions. That is the reaction of many on the far right, not just the far right.
I have an equal concern about the reaction on the left. I include myself in this group. I worry that the left has reacted to living alternative history, the turn from democratic dialogue to violence, even political terror like the January 6thInsurrection, in a way that mimics that aggression.
With either option, we have lost ourselves—abandoned our values—and we have contributed to the loss of a national political dialogue. If we are not speaking to our neighbors, we have lost the very foundation of democracy.
Both scenarios are forms of mimesis, or imitation. Mimesis is fundamental to human nature, to our ability to make connections with others and to learn how to live in our communities. Anthropologists have found, for example, that when people from different cultures first meet, without sharing a common language, they imitate each other’s gestures and make a fundamental human connection. That form of mimesis can create bonds and bring us together.
Mimesis can also have negative effects. When confronted with aggression, the actions of a bully, we can mimic that aggression, actively or implicitly supporting it. We can react to the aggression with escalating aggression.
In Conrad’s Shadow, Nidesh Lawtoo discusses how Joseph Conrad’s “The Duel,” generally regarded as a minor tale, presents a theme central to Conrad’s works. Conrad believed, according to Lawtoo’s interpretation, that the very foundation of social violence—even war—rests on our mimetic reaction to aggression. He writes:
“A violent, irrational attack triggers an equally violent defense—no matter how rational the defender is—which, in turn, will continue to fuel the initial attack. And once this interplay of attack and defense, action and reaction, is set in motion between the two parties endowed with equal force, a feedback loop generates a spiral of reciprocal violence fueled by an affective, contagious, and thus highly infective mimetic psychology. The duelists are thus not in control of violence; it is the reciprocal logic of violence that controls them.”
The same effect can happen on a cultural level. In the 1930s, Gregory Bateson coined the term schismogensis to describe how two cultures, geographically close to each other, develop cultures with opposing values. In Apologies to Thucydides, Marshall Sahlins wrote about Athens and Sparta:
“Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted . . . Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic, one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies . . . Athens and Sparta were antitypes.”
A lot of big words there (I had to look up four or five of them), but I’m sure you get the point. Apply this to what has been happening to our two-party system. Despite the historical differences between Republicans and Democrats, we at least shared certain values, until recently. But, in our rapidly changing and uncertain times, the parties have defined themselves in opposition to each other, instead of in opposition to some external threat.
This is my central point: We cannot begin to think democratically until we find ways to step back from mimetic reactions.
This takes awareness. As we discuss politics with “those other people,” the ones who seem so fundamentally different, we need to pay attention to their emotions and our emotions. If they are angry, remain calm. Take a breath. Pause. Break the chain of mimetic reactions that change us into someone we will no longer recognize, someone we do not want to be, someone who is failing to nurture democracy.
Mimesis is human nature, but human nature is not human destiny. Schismogenesis plays a role in our group identities, but we don’t have to devolve into a mob. As we confront the unreal of alternative history, we need to disrupt the mimetic reactions that come all too easily. We cannot lose our sense of what is normal. We cannot lose touch with core democratic values. We cannot become Trump.
The problem with American democracy is that people are ignorant. Many don't even know how ignorant they are. People don't know what their civic responsibilities are--or even that such things exist. The founders could not have envisioned the uninformed and illiterate America of today.