The Photo Album Novel

     Until last year I'd heard nothing, at least that I can remember, about Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge (1959). It was his first novel and a bestseller. But, in a writing life that generated 18 books, he didn't build on his early success. A New York Times obituary (he died in 2013) suggests it was because he worked in various genres, whatever piqued his interest, without perfecting any one thing. His first book was a short story collection. He waited perhaps too long to write a sequel to his breakthrough, Mr. Bridge, that could fully capitalize on it. Another bestseller came decades later. It was a history book, Custer's Last Stand. He'd had trouble finding a publisher and its popularity caught everyone by surprise. He wrote a biography of the painter Francisco Goya. And, through it all, he didn't seek the spotlight or positions of authority. He took odd jobs to pay the rent while he wrote and researched.

The novel, his most celebrated work, doesn't have any sort of hook to grab the reader. There's no plot. The language is unadorned. It's average in length. The title is forgettable. (I mistakenly wrote "Bridges" throughout my notes, like the last name of the Charlotte Hornets basketball player.) His main character is a sheltered, privileged housewife who makes a virtue of normality, doesn't do anything in particular that'd stand out, and doesn't once manage to examine herself very closely. It can almost seem designed to get lost among other books. All it needs is a beige dust jacket. As I read I thought of Richard Linklater's film Boyhood. The director once explained that, in depicting his subject, he chose unexceptional micromoments over big dramatic moments. The hook is that he filmed little by little over a period of years to correspond with the story's passage of time, enabling viewers to see the actors age naturally, along with their characters. It's about three hours long. I stopped watching after about two. Stitching together those unexceptional micromoments across an entire work is hard to pull off. Real can mean true but insipid, forgotten or abstracted for good reason.

What did I do today? There's an accurate, socially acceptable answer to the question that can persuade someone to never ask again.

The difference between the novel and the movie is that Connell chooses his micromoments better. Initially I wasn't sure he had. In over a hundred brief, titled chapters, it ranges from the start of Mrs. Bridge's marriage to after the death of her husband. Though it's not stated outright, it's her most baffling kid, the youngest, her son Douglas, that narrates in third-person. And the first third or so of the book is noticeably heavy on chapters that amount to a series of complaints. Mrs. Bridge, you see, is a nag. Take your elbow off the table. Don't put too much gravy on your mashed potatoes. You sit in your seat weird. You used the guest towels in the bathroom (towels that no one uses, not even her, because they're too nice). She sincerely can't understand why a kid would be messy, silly, unruly. Eventually, as one skirmish followed another and another, I paused and wondered if this would be the whole book, if Connell had written prosecutorial or revenge fiction, keenly observed from within, no shortcoming or mistake left unrevealed. And, given the trivial nature of the complaints, I hesitated to continue.

But I'm glad I did. Right where my doubts arose, the book begins to exhibit a more mature outlook, shifts in tone and emphasis gracefully, then does so again and again: sympathy for Mrs. Bridge's loneliness, gentle amusement tinged with sadness about her struggles to find something to do, loving frustration with her inability to probe the mysteries of her family. As I kept reading, I came to admire what Connell does in that first third, acknowledging - at the risk of overdoing it, to achieve the proper aggravating effect - a common aspect of having parents. One might be reluctant to say it out loud except behind closed doors to siblings and maybe close friends for fear of seeming unappreciative and disloyal: that daily dose of annoyance. Sometimes, as the adult making rules and enforcing them, annoying the children (and being annoyed by them, for that matter) is unavoidable. Same goes for sharing a space with other people. However, there's also annoying behavior that they can avoid and never will, no matter how many times you sigh or go dead-eyed or let your soul take a seat somewhere while your body does whatever it's going to do, I'll catch you later. That's what you get for allowing yourself to be born. This is a truth Connell bravely and eloquently portrays. Can I eat in peace for once? Can I dry my hands on a towel that was made for that purpose? To escape mom's relentless nitpicking, Douglas wisely chooses the safest option, climbing higher up a tree. 

(Oh, yours was a blissful family? Congratulations. Tell me: Where was your hiding spot? You fucking liar. I sort of understand, though. It's also worth acknowledging, for the sake of making an important distinction, those who'll read that previous paragraph and think: annoyance if you're lucky.)

One of the benefits of creating a book out of micromoments is that they're manifold, in two senses of the word, many and diverse. So Connell has the freedom to choose all kinds and, combined with his structure, goes further in fewer pages. There are chapters about how Mrs. Bridge parks a car and chapters about her polite racism, chapters about the state of her marriage and chapters about the dullards in her social circle, chapters that are like those immortal in-joke stories repeated through the years and chapters with revelations handled delicately by a son who cares deeply for the woman who raised him. (And Connell makes use of what he doesn't write about too. Silence, absence.) Right now I'm reading a book written, to some extent, from a distance. Certain passages are dutifully supported by broad details that can be gathered by doing homework but, on the everyday and human levels, they turn vague, all-purpose. Connell's book contains strangeness, the kind of strangeness that's lived, not invented. And it takes place in Kansas City and is clearly written from Kansas City, which brings the reader closer to it. For instance: Douglas discovers abandoned building materials in a vacant lot. He decides what he must do is spend a significant chunk of time and energy painstakingly turning it into an immoveable tower of garbage. It eventually gets taller than the surrounding fencing. Neighbors whisper. It's not hurting anyone and yet his mother finds it unseemly and feels the need to step in. Then, from the mind of a fixture: "The next morning as soon as Douglas left for school she telephoned the fire department. Everyone called the fire department when there was a problem that defied classification."

The word I scribbled between chapters, the first word I thought of upon finishing was completion. The reader gets a complete portrait of an individual and a family. Or maybe living, breathing photo album in prose would be more apt. Connell's feat is the best hook I can come up with: Mrs. Bridge is a novel about the unexamined, unspectacular life that works - and works beautifully.

Lists

     Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's The Soccer War (1986), translated by William Brand, inspires me to start a few lists. One is of the best lines from author bios. Kapuściński's entry: "He witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times." 

I've heard almost exclusively good things about his work through the years. Not long ago I read the first book of his I bought, a choice based on title, since every selection from his oeuvre seems as acclaimed as the others. His approach is tough to describe. It isn't quite formal reportage. But "informal reportage" isn't right because he is technically a paid professional. It isn't quite memoir. Sometimes it's diary. Several chapters are "notes" on a book he intends to write. Others are fragments from the frontlines: Algeria, Ghana, Cyprus, Honduras....

In Nigeria he's beaten. A lot. So much that he comes up with advice for how to take a beating: Don't fight back. Your assailant is never alone and fighting back will only get you beaten worse or murdered. But don't turn into a blubbering, craven mess, as showing weakness will also get you beaten severely or murdered. The book is filled with stories such as this: Kapuściński drives up to a checkpoint. The men who control the area pull him from his car and slap him around, demanding money. He gives them a little and someone hits him hard. He gives them more and is allowed to drive on. At the next checkpoint, he's pulled from his car and sprayed down with a flammable chemical. (They've been burning people, including women and children, alive.) He pays them and he's allowed to drive on. Now he's out of money. Coming up to the next checkpoint emptyhanded means death. So he floors it and breaks through the checkpoint, making it to the next village. But how is he going to return? He speaks to the police. Officers pile into his car to escort him.

Kapuściński doesn't swagger into danger. He's a modest man who happens to have an irrepressible urge to be at the center of great upheavals and experience danger for himself. Besides, he can't stand being at home, working in a safe, quiet environment, participating in mundane activities and conversations. Another list I'll start is of my favorite tirades. Kapuściński's entry: A multipage paragraph about his grudging tolerance of all furniture except desks. His hatred of desks.

Power struggles, mismanagement, corruption, food insecurity, bloodshed. Societies trying to stabilize, societies falling apart. The term "civil war" is currently being thrown around in the US and Kapuściński's book provides an insight into what that actually means. It's hell and yet, without softening his account, he preserves his lightness of touch, his humanity, his sense of humor. Every book on war I've read reveals its absurd side and he may take it furthest. As one breaks out, Kapuściński stumbles in the dark and wrestles a trash can.

The final list is entitled "Ryszard Kapuściński." It starts with The Soccer War and will continue through the rest of his work.

Ross Douthat Remembers Christopher Hitchens

     Ross Douthat, writing for The New Statesman, claims Christopher Hitchens aspired to be a second George Orwell. Without a doubt he admired Orwell, publishing a booklength study of him, Why Orwell Matters (2002), in which the prevailing sentiment is gratitude. It also marks the distinctions between the two. Hitchens, no matter what his aspirations were or were not, is certainly no George Orwell epigone. He ends his study of the great writer's life and work saying it's not what you think but how you think, a thought that doesn't receive my full endorsement. I wouldn't be impressed by "thinking" that undergirds a hateful ideology. But with Hitchens, Douthat makes the mistake of trashing him for what he thinks (as well as failing in his duty to improve civilization itself) without exploring the reason we remember him in the first place - how he thinks. In fact, he doesn't even allude to Hitchens's true appeal. It's not "brio," which no writer uniquely possesses. Sure, there are those willing to attack both the left and the right, though not necessarily memorably. Now show me the writer with a comparable sense of humor. Fair warning: You'll be searching long and hard. Those with an awful sense of humor and those with no sense of humor - the serious thinkers - take up most of the space and aren't budging any time soon. I wouldn't insult Hitchens by reducing him to the status of "wit." Some seem to make a living, perhaps a fine living, off a sort of fast food version of humor. And the internet is rife with humor of less substance than a burger that looks like someone punched. Which suggests that the world always seems to have a shamefully scarce supply of writers and thinkers who are synonymous with laughter, who can be counted on to truly laugh and appreciate laughter and enrage with laughter. When Hitchens died, the scarcity grew. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if few noticed.

Democracy, 2

     Closing thoughts on David Runciman's How Democracy Ends. A two-parter? Curse that DR!

On Catastrophe

There was a time when warning the public of environmental catastrophe was expected to galvanize it into collectively pressuring elected officials to remedy the situation. Not today. After decades, the threat of climate collapse, supported by a towering body of evidence, hasn't. Anyone attempting to have the same effect, Runciman observes, is at a disadvantage: The worst consequences must be imagined. Of the consequences visible now, they're both unevenly felt throughout the world and gradual. Even striking the right tone can be difficult, since most thoughts, including those about democracy, have a tendency to dissolve in the face of true catastrophe. 

People need to believe that what they do still matters. Otherwise they are liable to feel powerless. The challenge for anyone wanting to scare people into action is not to scare them into inaction instead. If democracy is just a sideshow, then democratic citizens are bound to feel sidelined. They might drift off again.

(Runciman also reasonably speculates that apocalyptic warnings were once novel but, in the 21st century, people have heard about the fast-approaching End one too many times.) 

Neither democracies nor non-democracies have taken the steps necessary to halt or mitigate climate collapse. In the former case, politicians voice support or denial, thereby putting it up for debate, creating another source of conspiracy theory. With no general agreement on the facts and no unified demand for proper action, democracy appears unable to decide what to do. Runciman displays what passes for optimism in 2022: Once the consequences are evenly felt throughout the world, he trusts it'll respond accordingly, as it has in the past, though by then it may be too late. 

One scenario that's missing from his list of catastrophes is a pandemic. What we've learned from our recent experience with one is that hospitals can fill up, medical workers can complain of burnout and express a sense of betrayal and leave the field, people can die in the hundreds of thousands in the US alone, the economy can be ravaged, and still there'll be no general agreement on the facts and a unified demand for proper action. What we get is more conspiracy theory. Each side uses the pandemic to attack the other. One state's policy differs from the next state's policy. A vaccine arrives but it's unclear how many are willing to take it. The Supreme Court, preventing the Biden administration from enforcing a testing-or-vaccination mandate on large companies, isn't too worried about the coronavirus as an occupational hazard. Looking to yesterday's track record on this matter doesn't seem to serve as a reliable guide for collective future behavior either. Updated with the latest findings, the record is now spottier. For a considerable number of people, serious illness and death can simply be waved off if it means being inconvenienced or going by the word of a liberal.

Nuclear disarmament was once a pressing issue. Now barely anyone talks about it. The few who do are unelected officials. To disarm or not isn't a question asked of voters in democracies. And we can't be sure how we even managed to get this far, whether through skillful political maneuvering or sheer luck or some mysterious combination of the two. Until a nuke detonates or we get rid of them entirely, we live with uncertainty.

Nuclear catastrophe lacks grip because it is an all-or-nothing phenomenon. There is nothing that can make it real without threatening to make everything else effectively meaningless. It is too huge to grasp. So we cross our fingers and hope that our luck holds.

Runciman similarly examines the potential for the system to be infiltrated by evil, the threat of new technology, and the threat that one flaw in an interconnected system can take everything down, and finds that democracy and existential risk make a bad pair. Democracy can't manage any of the catastrophes he writes about, while the experts and theorists focused on existential risk tend to think of democracy as a distraction or of secondary concern without being able to elude or suppress it. Yet they remain a pair. And we live with uncertainty on all fronts.

On Technological Takeover

The date for the emergence of AI has been pushed back repeatedly, and can't do it.

Alternatives to Democracy

As tempting as it is to write about the entire book, I can't give so much of it away. To promote the joys of discovery, and to not be lame, I jump ahead to my

Conclusion

One can make a record of reality as it unfolds and leave it there. Or one can go further, warning of distressing trends today. And yet further: Provide a solution or prophesize where we will be tomorrow. Issuing a warning on the state of democracy is natural and sensible. Who'll listen? Those shouting for a better democracy may be shouting for a worse democracy or no democracy (while accusing the other side of the same). The situation devolves. As Runciman puts it: "conspiracy theory v. conspiracy theory in the name of democracy." Constructive solutions are hard to come by and Runciman doesn't have one either, though he doesn't pretend to have one. Prophecies are easier to come by. It'd be an exaggeration to say Runciman has his own. Instead he argues comprehensively and persuasively that democracy will be here when we wake up, limping into the foreseeable future and, a few years on, that's precisely what's happened. But the coming years or decades could prove him wrong and if he is, he'll be pummeled on that basis alone. (Treatment that certain prophets may not receive if their prophecies turn out to be wrong.) Set the crystal ball aside. My last compliment for David Runciman is that his book enlarges and refines my view of the present.

Democracy

     In which a concerned citizen gets around to reading a couple of books on democracy.

1.

Sensible people who favor democracy can agree on what an authoritarian is. What they may not agree on is a solution for protecting democracy. Or what they mean by democracy. That was what I thought after reading Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracy Dies (2018). The writers are in favor of democracy - but not too much of it. "Gatekeeping," one of the key terms of the book, is the process of filtering out unsuitable candidates for higher office before they can be voted into power. Going back to Alexander Hamilton and the origin of the Electoral College, they acknowledge that it's arguably not so democratic for candidates to be handpicked for voters through backroom wheeling and dealing but ultimately stand by that system as the best of bad options. Henry Ford, a wealthy businessman (the Ford in Ford Motor Company), widely admired for his rags-to-riches tale, had a vanity publication he used to spread antisemitic ravings. Hitler was an admirer. The Nazis later awarded him with a medal. In the 1920s, his name surfaced as a potential presidential candidate and, despite having no experience in public office, garnered enough support among voters to give him a shot. But the gatekeepers refused to take him seriously, putting an end to his campaign before it started. Then there was the popularity of Joe McCarthy, which peaked at around 40%, the same as Trump. Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize that a functioning democracy is one that has some protection from the people.

But, after the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention, the primaries were made binding, weakening that protection. The writers praise Democrats for a change that came soon after to retain the gatekeeping function: superdelegates. Republicans, on the other hand, held on to the too-democratic primary system, leaving the gate wide open for the candidate they call the modern Henry Ford. Other contributing factors to democratic regression should be well known to anyone who's followed politics closely for even the last year or so. If not, here it is in one place: Racism. The changed media landscape that profits handsomely by serving up whatever interpretation of reality people want to hear, warping them, making them more susceptible to extremist views, reducing common ground. Rightwing politicians like Newt Gingrich, who devised and distributed an outline for attacking the opposition with inflammatory language, or like Tom DeLay, who encouraged his fellow Republicans to do anything that wasn't illegal to gain an advantage. The Supreme Court. Laws aren't enough, they say. Politicians in a democracy must be committed to democracy, compromise even if it means their party suffers a temporary setback, and uphold standards of conduct. 

No constructive answer is provided for how to get them to ignore the incentives to break these rules. As for restoring the gatekeepers to power, I see no reason why people would forfeit the right to choose candidates once given it, or that much of anything can be kept behind closed doors in the age of the internet and social media and camera phones. The book's argument is neat and simple and appeals to the US citizen's fear and anger with thoughts that were readily available when the book was first published. It's written as a warning but, more accurately, it's written as a warning to those in power. In this discussion of democracy, the average citizen is abstract victim, nuisance, or threat, not rightful participant. And so I take my business elsewhere.

2.

Recommendations

Among the reviews of How Democracy Dies, I found one in the Guardian by a writer, Cambridge professor, and podcast host named David Runciman. He criticizes it for having "remarkably little" to say about why people are discontented with democracy. His conclusion:

This is a provocative and readable book, but in the end it is also an unsatisfying one. It shares the weakness of too much contemporary political science, by treating history as a useful guide to the future, despite the paucity of the dataset, the superficiality of much of the evidence, and the long track record we have of being surprised by what comes next. I say this as a historian: if we want to know how our democracies might die, we have to stop looking to our yesterdays.

Then I encountered a couple of recommendations in two other publications: David Runciman, David Runciman. Finally I discovered David Runciman in the "Democracy" section of my reading list, added I don't remember when. ...David Runciman? I ordered a book of his called How Democracy Ends (from the same year, 2018).

The first compliment I'll pay to the book is this: how democracy ends, appropriately enough, defies easy summary. In the time since I finished, I've felt daunted about returning to my notes, which include pages and pages of rather long, quoted passages, to give an accurate sense of where he stands and why. There are writers for whom "nuance" means subjecting the reader to endless lectures to grasp every last strand of a thought, which can be doubly damaging if the thought isn't worth it (if the reader hasn't already hanged herself by the time the strands are all gathered). Runciman is a nuanced thinker, in mild, pithy, aphoristic style. He establishes his position drawing from a wider range of sources than Levitsky and Ziblatt, boosting the force of his argument, and confronting the counterarguments to it in the same manner, as Levitsky and Ziblatt neglect to do. He takes care to make distinctions between forms of government and historical moments. He's thorough as he covers much ground. As a result, it's almost three books for the price of one that read like one, too. The fatigue it causes is the ideal kind, frequently paying off by uncovering the molten core of a crucial idea. A daunting but worthwhile challenge to lay out what Runciman thinks because of how he thinks.

(Although both books are equally a letdown in the area of linguistic flavor, which I'm not sure is a feature of political science writing generally. Runciman's opening sentence: "Nothing lasts forever." I omit my quip. Elsewhere: someone is swatted like a fly and people have other fish to fry and people throw up their arms in despair and the forest can't be seen for the trees. And I choose to forget his clangorous, if infrequent, use of exclamation points.)

His interest is in examining the threats not just to any democracy but to democracies such as ours, ones in middle age, with a long history of peaceful transfers of power and resisting total collapse, experiencing a "midlife crisis." The threats he weighs are coups, catastrophes, and technological takeover. 

On Coups

One thing that separates Runciman from Levitsky and Ziblatt, as well as many contemporary writers on politics, is that he's not convinced Trump is capable of destroying US democracy. He uses an example of another democratic collapse of the 20th century, in 1960s Greece. One day, incited by US intelligence, the military announced it was taking over. They had the guns. They seized control of sources of information. And they took over. This is a story that would have fit in How Democracy Dies except Runciman makes a different point: At the time, Greece's democracy was relatively young, foundationally shaky, and thus highly vulnerable to a frontal assault. Then he jumps forward to Greece in the 21st century. Though close to total economic collapse, there was no threat of total democratic collapse. The reason he proffers is that, by then, democracy had been around for decades. It's the same reason he's skeptical of writers that compare US democracy now with the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany: a young, shaky democracy, economic collapse that spread deep discontent with the government, a political figure backed up by an organized legion of thugs that quickly seized control of sources of information. Test this against the Capitol riot: Trump's attempted election theft was backed up by a disorganized mob draped in flags (American and Confederate) and wearing viking helmets whose numbers were too small to ever have a real chance of overthrowing the federal government and seizing control of sources of information across the entire country. Evidence of their crimes spread swiftly and globally. They're being identified and arrested and publicly castigated. Democracy survived. Another thing that separates Runciman: Inclusivity. He says democracy survives in the US because it's been in place for hundreds of years and we, average citizens accustomed to it, are the ones who keep it there. That also makes us complicit.

A coup d'etat works on the basis of intimidation and coercion. But a group that hides behind the workings of democracy can hope to get by on the public's innate passivity. In most functioning democracies, the people are bystanders much of the time anyway. They watch on as political decisions are taken on their behalf by elected representatives who then ask for their assent at election time. If that's what democracy has become, it provides excellent cover for the attempt to undermine democracy, because the two look remarkably similar.

A refreshing modification missing from most opinions on the potential failure of our democracy: we live in a representative democracy. We vote for politicians to take care of the tangled details so we have more time to do what we want. Problems arise from that system. It's not that he believes our democracy is impregnable. The open power grab may be unlikely to work but the one that works slowly, incrementally, anywhere other than the front, where we're not paying much attention, may. What's more, without the clarity of the direct government takeover, we live in a kind of gray space democratically, talking of its potential failure without ever really being sure if it's happened. His preferred term for this state of affairs: "zombie democracy."

Coups and real conspiracies go hand in hand. Another common cause of despair these days, though, is the persistent air of conspiracy theory without the coup. First, consider how representative democracy works: it empowers elites who, sooner or later, work away from the public eye. "Any political system that trumpets the value of openness while holding on to its secrets will create the space in which conspiracy theories can flourish." (Runciman forces me to reassess my earlier assumption: the elites are best positioned to adjust for advances in technology to locate the shadows beyond their reach and maintain the same relationship to society.) So we should always expect conspiracy theories to be floating around. The sense of despair becomes understandable, however, if a majority rather than a minority of people begin subscribing to them.

In this context, Runciman gives his definition of a term that I think is one of the most confusing of our time, seeing as it's been used against politicians as opposed as Trump and Bernie Sanders: populism. For Runciman, populism is the rhetoric of taking back power from the elites, fueled by conspiracy theory, and weaponized by marginal figures on both the right and the left. It's cropped up in the past under certain conditions: "economic distress, technological change, growing inequality and the absence of war." (On these grounds, his preferred comparison, though without suggesting it's a mirror image, for our time is to the 1890s.) And it's proved useful by pushing mainstream politicians to seek reform. Testing this against the financial crash of 2008, which he mentions, I must partially disagree with Runciman. Back then, there were perpetrators, not spectral bogeymen. Bernie Sanders wore no tinfoil hat, starred in no eerie YouTube videos, aimed his ire at no vague target. He sought real justice and real reform within the bounds of democracy. Clearly he did his part pushing the party toward, at the very least, modest reform, while always insisting that the final goal is major reform - the major reform Runciman himself admits would mark real progress. On the other hand, Trump came to prominence in political life with a racist conspiracy theory and ran for president on a vague conspiracy theory that Washington was a swamp he'd drain and once in office conspiracy theory (and, of course, out of office more conspiracy theory - and not in the neutral language of elites but in the inflammatory language of traitors and thieves). But then the other half of the characterization doesn't fit: though his messaging resonated to an extent with the segment of rightwing voters who lost homes and lost jobs and had no safety net to speak of, he pushes his party further right, toward undoing reform on most any level and away from democracy. Which sounds more demagogic and authoritarian than populist. This may be one difference between 2018 and 2021: Populism, he notes, can turn either into social democracy or something more malign. Trump is something more malign. Many would say he made the "turn" a long time ago, the populist element buried with it. Runciman didn't go so far as to call him an aspiring dictator or neofascist when How Democracy Ends was first published but perhaps he's changed his thinking after January 6th, 2020 due to the turn he refers to. Anyway, "populism" remains confusing. A bifurcation of the term (populist social democrat or democratic socialist/populist authoritarian or neofascist) would help but my questions are: Who does it really apply to and how long does the transitional term remain relevant? A blemish but Runciman makes his stance clear instead of continuing on assuming everyone accepts the equivalence. And it returns this section to the theme of popular discontent.

In a young democracy: Potential. Sweeping changes ahead. In a middle-aged democracy: The sweeping changes - expanding the franchise, the state providing social services - have already happened. Fights narrow. There's less potential.

Democracy is not working well - if it were, there would be no populist backlash. But attempts to make it work better focus on what we feel we have lost rather than on what we have never even tried. Political arguments revolve around ideas of recovery and rescue - of the welfare state, the constitution, the economy, our security, our freedom. Each side wants to recapture something that has been taken away. This helps to feed the conspiracist mindset. ...Trying something new can be a shared democratic experience. Rescuing something that has been lost is partial - the losers look for someone else to blame.

Another shared experience that has brought democratic nations together is war. After the 1890s, reforms were enacted that had the potential to bring progress. Then World War I came, and with it, for instance, mass enfranchisement in the US and Britain, since to mobilize people, they must be deeply invested in democracy. The New Deal was a sweeping attempt to address a political and economic crisis. Then World War II came. To fight a war, a nation needs healthy citizens and jobs for them to do. Thus: the welfare state. 

An old political science slogan says that states make war and war makes states. Democracy is not an exception to that. Democracies make wars and wars make democracies. This sometimes gets obscured by another slogan of political science, which states that democracies don't go to war with each other. Even if this were true, there have always been enough militant non-democracies to go around.

Still, while wars between democracies and non-democracies continue to break out today, World War III is unlikely because advances in military weaponry would guarantee annihilation for everyone involved. So rising inequality, one of the primary causes for popular discontent, doesn't have war to mend it this time. "We do not have a historical answer to the question of how to tackle inequality that does not involve large-scale violence. There is no evidence that democracy alone can do it." And:

In democracy we now have a political system that can suppress the causes of violence without being able to address the problems that outbreaks of violence served to resolve in the past. Minor progress is possible. Big progress is elusive, and always liable to be derailed by the backlash small progress provokes. We may be stuck.

2021: Inequality increases. Minor progress. Backlash to minor progress. Mutual mistrust. And we're stuck.