Feedback

I have noticed that J.K Rowling and the Trans community are not very a happy with each other. I am not a stakeholder in their dispute as I do not use the washrooms in question but not being a stakeholder allows me to something that is glaringly obvious and, as far as I can tell, invisible to the participants: J.K Rowling and her critics are stuck in a feedback loop. Every act of calling out J.K. Rowling and her fans elicits a new act of insensitivity and defiance. This evokes yet more calling out which is, predictably, met by yet more defiance. Liberal, progressive and conservative Americans are stuck in the same loop. Even some liberals have figured out that the aim of the Trump voter is to goad you into calling him stupid which is the point at which he wins the argument. Of course knowing this does not solve the problem for a feedback loop, once it is constituted, is virtually unbreakable. This is unfortunate because a feedback loop, once it starts, will end ultimately in physical confrontation. The Liberal/Conservative loop in the U.S will be turning into a shooting war as sure as I’m sitting here for there is nowhere else it can go. Trump has upped the ante to the point where the stakes are absolute and when the stakes are absolute people go to war. Conservatives, of course, expect that liberal pansies will fold and submit to their rules because they are more zealous, manly and forceful. This is actually true of the Democratic Party but it is not true of the general population and hubristic over-reach by the buoyant right will bring forth a reaction as night brings day. They will swagger confidently till their bluff is finally called and the country simply splits apart with the rich blue half going its own way. At that point an enraged right wing will follow the example of Lincoln and the two to four Americas will fall to destroying each other which will leave the right in charge of a bleeding rump at best or ruling a country devastated from coast to coast at worst. This is all what Oriental thought termed karma, the law of cause and effect in human affairs. 

This war will be, in part, the result of what I call asymmetric aggression. This operates on several levels and assures the permanent inferiority of the Democratic Party even when they are in power. The Republicans are an alpha party and the Democrats a beta one. The first reason is the way the parties are gendered. Men tend to lean Republican and women Democrat. This means the Republican party is figured as masculine and the Democratic party as feminine. This framing is bad for Democrats because it limits the degree of resistance they can offer. If Republicans go for the jugular they are manly and forceful but if the Democrats do likewise they are shrill, bitchy and unpleasant. They must appear ‘reasonable’ while their opponents storm and rage exactly as women do in the general society. Secondly, the Republicans (as the favorite of older white voters) are the natural governing party just as the Liberals are in Canada. This means that Republicans are free to govern as they please but Democrats must govern as moderate Republicans in a manner perceived as co-operative and bi-partisan. Thirdly Republicans are much more engaged existentially in the process of political struggle. They are the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. Democrats deal in brokerage politics and business as usual. They defend corporate interests that are as well or better taken care of under Republicans leaving them little incentive to fight. Even on cultural issues, such as Roe vs. Wade, Democrats do not have the ideological zeal of Republicans for, to put it bluntly, most of them can afford to send their daughters abroad to obtain abortions. Add to this the fact that president Trump may face legal jeopardy if he loses in November and you have a situation where Republicans will do literally anything to remain in power while Democrats can sit and watch them knowing their donors get more deregulation either way. Plus, brokerage politicians have no understanding of how to deal with ideological zealots because they can’t think like them. They always think a deal can be struck of some sort that will get us all back to business as usual even though that deal is not there and never has been. You can no longer split the difference once a feedback loop has formed! 

The result of all of this will be an utterly unsustainable situation where a nation state is concerned for it means that either the executive or the judicial branch will be perceived as illegitimate by roughly half the electorate. This is surely not sustainable. No state can function long unless basic institutions and procedures are respected by all. This will exacerbate the feedback loop ten-fold for each end of it will regard the other as thieves who have stolen the nation from them. As for any of my more partisan readers I must emphasize to you that blame for this situation is now largely irrelevant. The situation now has a momentum of its own and debating who started it is now for historians (Newt Gingrich, actually, for what it's worth). If you think fake news or Hollywood has systematically deluded the people, well, that is now part of the feedback generating rhetoric as much as lampooning Mormons or blaming Russia. I know how eager you are to tell me that none of this would be happening if only x, y or z could see reason or if only a, b or c would stop being a snowflake or if only there were more science in the curriculum or  more prayer but, frankly, the loop is now WELL beyond that discussion. It is from this point self-constituting and any energy fed into it will only make it spin faster.    

Perhaps this is not enough to generate a shooting war, as opposed to a political or media one, absent a couple other factors. The first is that neither side can accurately judge the resolve and determination of the other. This leads to hubristic over reach that deepens the loop. Liberals think and in fact literally say that the cultural divide in the US will resolve itself when the ignorant barbarians die off and are replaced by happy progressive children. They also think demographic change will guarantee the same result. Unfortunately, their opponents know this and will burn the country down before they let it happen. Conservatives, on the other hand, think that they represent the silent majority of ‘real’ Americans. They think, as their opponents once dangerously assumed, that once Roe v. Wade is overturned the pink pussy hatted ladies will go cry in their wine glasses. They think America will simply revert to the 1950’s norm and feckless and corrupt liberals will go away. I have talked to enough people on both sides of this divide to know that this is pure fantasy. Blue America will not submit to a new abortion regime imposed by a court it regards as illegitimate. Red America will not submit to losing its racial privilege which, in the case of many immiserated whites, is literally all it has left. The rights and wrongs of these, and other issues, no longer matter as they are now beyond the debate stage and will be resolved by force. The result of that will be some form of Pyrrhic victory for the right (the minority side but the side will all the fanaticism and energy which counts for more than raw numbers) which leaves an America broken and sadly diminished on the world stage. Of course, I doubt very much that American conservatives, deep in their nihilistic hearts, really think they will ever establish a generous pro-life ethos in American society. Indeed, there is ample evidence that they scarcely care about such a thing anymore if they ever did. Overturning Roe is about making the pussy hats cry and nothing else. It is revenge, pure and simple, on a corrupt and worthless nation that has failed them.   

The fact that neither side of this divide can accurately gauge the commitment of the other points to another problem: to understand the other is to contextualize the other and to contextualize is to humanize. This is the final turn of the screw in a feedback loop: people begin to regard the other not as humans with human motives but as abstract avatars of good and evil.  A New Hampshire woman in a pink hat and a rust belt farmer with a MAGA hat cannot in fact empathize with each other on a visceral level. Each can say, with the intellect, that the other is as human as they are but the intellect does not fully rule in such matters. A nation ceases to exist when this othering goes to the point where people are simply indifferent to each other’s fate: where COVID deaths in ‘liberal anarchist cities’ are met with a shrug and a yawn in the Dakotas and the lady in the Pink hat is simply past caring that people in Rural Georgia live in food deserts. I suspect that this state of affairs now exists though I will happily be proved wrong (indeed Americans prove me wrong!). That means that the U.S. as it currently exists is a lost cause. What then about Canada? Will the same dynamic replicate itself here? After all, Americans of all sorts will probably start fleeing here in some numbers bringing their cultural and political baggage with them and if things get bad enough it will not be moral to turn them away. That will be the subject of a future piece.