The Circuit Breaker

There’s no need for revolution, civil war, an approaching asteroid or an alien invasion to get us to sort ourselves out and change course. A shock to the system can take many forms. And violence is amongst the least effective routes.

After the attempted assassination of candidate and former President Trump last weekend, there was no shortage of voices (some since retracted) implying or outright claiming it was the end. Political violence had escalated to the next disturbing level and it would all but seal the deal on an election and indeed, American democracy.

With sides lined up, often on opposite ends of the same dinner table, it’s hard not to get the impression of a country on the verge of conflict. And, based on history, one might also guess an assassination attempt would cause a huge swing of sympathy.

Surely this would secure a Trump victory. Widespread violence. Project 2025. The end of Democracy.?

Catastrophe.

But then the first polls since the attempt started coming out. And lo, there was no huge shift in polling. No major swing in favour of the former Commander in Chief. Instead, it was largely more of the same. Trump slightly ahead. Democrats arguing about leadership. And a nation breathing a collective albeit nervous sigh.

Why?

Chaos Fatigue

Because this is no Reagan/Mondale election. After the last 8, 10, 16, 24 years of rhetoric, polarisation and entrenchment, there is no ten-point swing to be had. Nor is it Germany in the 30s (or indeed the US in the 1860s). This is the USA in the 2020s and it’s a huge mess of contradiction. More interconnected and dependent than at any other point in history, yet intensely divided on virtually everything. Exposed like a nerve to a raging river of information on everyone and everything, yet subject to an ocean of nonsense.

And perhaps, most significantly – really really tired.

So much so that any apparent escalation has the almost counterintuitive effect of making most people just bury their heads in their hands and pray for a bit of peace and quiet.

There was no Reagan-esque Trump bump because most people, and in particular most independents and “ok fine” voters (many of which are registered Republicans or Democrats), are sick and tired of the absurd chaos of it all. If anything, and if he continues on doing what he does, the effect may very well tilt in the opposite direction.

People are exhausted. And while there are certainly a large number who have bought into the narrative of inevitability, most people don’t want widespread violence. They want safety and stability and hope. They have families and children and jobs and lives to live.

Authoritarians win when they successfully convince enough people that those things are under threat. But they undermine their chances when they start talking about revenge and promoting comprehensive fascist overhauls of large swathes of government.

So did the likelihood of an authoritarian takeover of the United States suddenly get more likely over the weekend? No, probably not.

But is it still possible? Yes, absolutely.

There is unquestionably danger in the current political climate and a very real threat to democracy and its institutions, not just in the US but globally, from the machinations of domestic US politics as well as the influence of other geopolitical powers.

And yes, most people, despite wanting peace and quiet, don’t necessarily believe it’s possible anymore. The polls might not have shifted much in the last few days, but they’re still…not good. Joe Biden is still not a great candidate in his present state. And the resilient institutions that were supposed to keep everything together have shown their weaknesses. There’s ample room for abuse, countless interconnected problems, intractable differences of opinion and a pervasive fecklessness when it comes to doing anything about it.

Defeatism in the air.

One way or the other, we feel, something big and bad is going to happen and the only way out is through.

It is typical when we get to points of extreme political polarisation and impasse like the one the US finds itself in at the moment to default to the notion that only destructive events carry the requisite impact to knock things into a different gear. There’s also the incredibly poisonous idea that we need to destroy before we can create.

But these moments, these inflection points, don’t all need to be destructive. In fact, usually, when a political ‘change’ is preceded by destruction, people tend to rebuild things in a manner not dissimilar to how they were before. It’s one of the many reasons why ‘most’ revolutions fail.

Instability and violence begets instability and violence. Civil conflict is not a path out or away from this entrenchment. It just sets up more down the road.

But then if that’s not the thing that shakes things loose, what is?

A Serious Job to Do

A couple of months ago, in what is known as the ‘hush money’ case, but which was actually a case of election interference, Donald Trump was convicted by jury on all counts.

That means that a group of people, a partial cross section of society, saw all the evidence, heard all the arguments, and came to a common decision. In spite of the enormous pressure. In spite of the absurd noise of background politics. And in spite of, what must have been in some cases (particularly with some jurors citing Fox News and Truth Social as main sources of information), their own political views.

It is telling that such a sensible, serious deliberative act seems so unusual in today’s political climate. Yet they happen every day, albeit under slightly less duress. And they are, more often than not, successful at triggering a cognitive reset of sorts.

Put simply, when people find themselves in a diverse new group and are handed an incredibly serious job to do, they usually do it. At that point, regardless of what they may have spoken or even vehemently believed in the past, the job, the responsibility, the expectation and the surroundings, both physical and social, demand a change. For many in that situation it can even provide an excuse for it, or a sense of relief. We’re so bottled up in our patterns of thought and socialisation that a moment like that doesn’t come along very often.

Think about other scenarios that do the same. Scenarios like a natural disaster. These are opportunities for us to cut the cord and be better. And while yes, a natural disaster is destructive, it’s not the destruction that triggers the change, it’s the intense shared experience that rearranges priorities and results in cooperation.

So how do we replicate that?

Well, for starters we can look to the example above. A sense of seriousness and responsibility in politics goes a long way. But it’s hard to scale. It’s definitely hard to recover from the current position, with farcical nonsense populating every stream of media in the public sphere. And it’s extremely hard to convey the sense of agency and impact that is carried with it at smaller scales.

If you’re on a jury, you feel your voice means something. If you’re one of 150 million voters, less so.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We might try, for example, actually listening to voters. We might also try engaging those same voters in deliberative and participatory practices beyond a disembodied vote for representatives once every few years. Something which, like a jury, has the added benefit of presenting new social environments for a political activity to take place.

Citizen participation initiatives like citizens’ assemblies represent one way to reinvigorate the democratic process with agency and responsibility. Give people the evidence. Hand them the paperwork. And put them in a close-knit group with their peers to make a call.

But the job needs to be important and the results need to be consequential.

If we want democracy to get better. We need people to do better. But that also means politics has to mean more. Again, like a jury, if you ask them to make a decision and the results don’t go anywhere, I wonder, will they do the same next time?

There are plenty of issues out there that would qualify and have the intended effect to greater or lesser degrees. Climate change for one. Data protection. Immigration. Artificial Intelligence.

Perhaps even, say, a party convention and the selection of a new candidate.

Whether or not the political will exists is another question. As is whether or not a large-scale initiative of this kind could survive contact with the current political climate.

So perhaps before we can adopt practices that sustain, restore and rebuild democracy, we need to reset it.

So what else is there?

The Novelty of the Ordinary

When people tire of the ordinary, they look to the new, the different and the interesting.

But when the ‘interesting’ drags on and on, overloading every sense and clogging every artery, it stops being quite so interesting and begins to look and feel like chaos. An unpredictable mess that keeps us on edge and makes coherent narrative hard to form.

For twenty-plus years now, the modus operandi of information warfare targeting democracies has been to foment so much chaos that anything that floats looks like a life raft. The strategy was intended to destabilise. Polarise. And create space to advance alternate agendas. It’s information warfare but it’s also psychological warfare. And it has, on virtually all fronts, worked.

But it may have now come full circle, by making moderate centrist 'normality' more appealing than ever. Because when asteroids have been raining down daily for the last decade or more, the solution, the key to political change,? is not a bigger asteroid. It’s a reminder of what a clear sunny day actually looks like.

In the last election, Joe Biden was the (relative) normality candidate. In this election, that edge has somewhat dissipated. The events of the last few months have seen his campaign slip more and more into its own brand of bizarre.

That’s not an attempt at false equivalency. It’s just a statement of fact. It’s not normal. Nor should it be. And so the search is on for the ordinary to retake the middle ground.?

But ordinary, or should I say the novelty which ordinary currently holds, is only as good as the hope it inspires. It’s no good being different if there’s not a clear communicable vision of what that difference entails. In 2008, Obama represented the new and carried an explicit message of hope and change. He communicated it. And people believed it, for a time at least.

In retrospect, many see the Obama presidency as being a rubber band pulled too tight and Clinton’s loss to Trump in the following election as a right-wing reaction. But this is only partly true. The Obama presidency was not a rubber band. It was a slowly deflating balloon.?It had momentum. And it went largely nowhere with it. Progressive policies had (and still have) popular support. Americans wanted new and different and what they got was more of the same. Then Clinton came along representing even more still and the energy was all but lost.

Trump, meanwhile, was most certainly different.

Eight years later and the equation is almost flipped. Enough. Enough of the new. Please for the love of god, just give us a normal life. A normal boring politics.

This could be a golden opportunity for the centrists. And some small victory for progressives as well, being that a host of progressive policies are now perceived as very much centre of the road. All they need to do is find someone competent, coherent and preferably under retirement age, that people in the centre don’t vehemently hate.

The circuit breaker. The reset button for American Democracy couldn’t be more obvious.

It’s just a half-decent candidate.

Reset and Rebuild

There is a tendency to think of democracy as a fragile thing. And it is, in many ways. This blog is, after all, called ‘Sustainable Democracy’. It’s a framework for keeping the whole thing going as there are innumerable things that can wear it down and destroy it and are doing so as we speak.

But it’s also worth remembering that democracies are not the only fragile system of governance. Single leader autocracies, monarchies, dictatorships, etc, are all fundamentally fragile as well. I would argue more so.

Unstable centres of power desperately trying to keep the lid on a boiling pot of social and political activity. They also are vulnerable to collapse. And when they do, power spills over, spreads out and is reconstituted elsewhere.

Go back far enough and the first quasi-political states-of-being were ones of distributed authority and responsibility. Power was concentrated from the collective in order to manage complex social and economic structures. Then it spent the next however many thousands of years collapsing over and over again until various groups in various places figured out ways to manage things a little better.

As a group, more often than not, we gravitate towards democracy. And although there are undoubtedly forces both within and without that despise democracy and prefer authoritarianism outright, for whatever selfish or misguided Malthusian reason, the majority of those who want a strong authoritarian leadership do so because they believe democracy is broken. They believe it cannot repair itself and cannot be repaired – instead succumbing to the same defeatist mentality mentioned before.

But hopelessness is fertile ground for hope. And it doesn’t take much to bring it back. All it needs is the slightest indication that things can be better and folks will grab it with both hands.

What is required, however, and perhaps represents the final piece of the puzzle, is authenticity.

No, it’s not necessarily required for immediate superficial success. We can all see that.? Political movements can be, have been, and are being built on hot air. But they also inevitably collapse. The balloon pops or deflates and when this happens, it is actively damaging across the board. People get pissed off, and they go looking for alternate means to relieve the tension, often radicalising even further and the tension keeps rising.

Right now that tension is at historical levels. But it’s not quite as bad as it might seem. Or even as bad as it has been at other points in the past. We continue to make the mistake of believing that online reality is a reasonable reflection of social and political reality when it is more akin to a shadow. It has twisted our perspective and that needs to be accounted for.

So while everything might seem like it’s pointing in the direction of horrendous, destructive political and civil strife and it might feel almost inevitable – it’s not.?

And if someone, anyone could reset and rebuild – if they could offer serious politics once more, followed up by the opportunity for citizens to take responsibility and have an impact and an authentic hopeful vision of what the future might look like – they would win.

Democracy would win. America would win.

And probably keep on winning. For a good long while yet.