A failure of imagination

Americans cannot see what is happening because the historical stereotypes they got in school are blocking their perpetual apparatus

In an interview this week with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Bollinger, former Dean at the University of Michigan Law School and longtime President of Columbia University, makes a crucial observation:

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as the people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create and illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions.

Bollinger is absolutely right: what American liberals (academics especially) have suffered from continuously for the last decade is a failure of imagination. They have been unable to imagine the nature of the authoritarian threat posed by MAGA, and this has produced the twin pathology of being unable to anticipate what is going to happen next and passivity as those things happen. This is despite the fact that MAGA has been quite transparent about what it intends to do. Even now the New York Times (the self-appointed house organ of Official Liberalism) cannot bring itself to properly label what we are seeing with plain words like “dictatorship” nor does it dare to say that the common result of dictatorship is “civil war.”

But the purpose of this post is not to lay out that failure of imagination in detail, nor to discuss the consequences of that failure. Rather, I’d like here to make a narrower observation — or more precisely: to propose a hypothesis — about why it is that Americans are experiencing this failure of imagination. I believe it is because they are blinded to their current political reality by a kind of historical aesthetics long inculcated in schools and the media about the nature of dictatorship and civil war.

What do I mean? Americans are having a hard time seeing what is in front of our noses because of the iconography that got put in our heads in school that (a) “dictatorship” = cinderblock totalitarianism, and (b) “civil war” = masses of blues and grays arrayed on formal battlefields. And since we look around and don’t see those things around us, we think dictatorship isn’t happening and that civil war cannot be in the offing.

In other words, Americans look around and don’t see those images around them in today’s America, and so we can’t find those labels. Because of the images we were given in school and on the History Channel and in the movies, we think a statist dictatorship is supposed to look like this:

And we don’t recognize it when it looks like this:

Likewise, we think “civil war” is supposed to look like this:

And we don’t recognize it when it looks like this:

@joyreidofficialQuite an admission by #jessewaters …. #maga #theamericanright #informationwarfare #fyp

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So this is my hypothesis: the normie “failure of imagination” regarding what MAGA is doing is a result of over-indexing on a certain set of hypostatized (sorry) historical memories of past episodes of dictatorship and civil war — memories that effectively block the ability of the normies to see what is self-evidently unfolding before their very eyes. Look at these headlines:

The New York Times can run all these headlines and yet… still cannot draw the obvious conclusion as to what it needs to be called.

Here’s the point: what’s about to happen is not going to be a 19th century civil war or a 20th century style of totalitarianism, because we are no longer in the 19th or 20th century. So yes, we are facing dictatorship and civil war, but for sure it is going to look very different from those earlier incarnations.