The Last Days of Discourse

My first Nation column and some other quick thoughts

I’m pleased to share my first column for The Nation. It’ll be out monthly online and regularly in print, as well. The title for the column is “The Last Days of Discourse” and this month I gave a little intro to what I’ll try to do with the space:

The current media landscape appears at a distance to be multifarious, but on closer inspection reveals itself as desolate: We are confronted with a constant barrage of hysterical cable news anchors, decontextualized video snippets, speculative manias, streaming content that feeds an insatiable thirst for “drama,” and social media mobs. Instead of a pluralism of voices, we have a cacophony that eventually gives way to monotony, an unbearable din that dulls the mind and the senses. Those in charge deliberately broadcast noise and emotional electric shocks. The “platforms” are controlled by an oligarchy of tech billionaires who speak in Orwellian fashion about “free speech” but are actually interested only in profits, power, and control. While it appears that it has never been easier for anyone to freely share their opinions with the world, the apparatus that shapes the public’s thoughts and sentiments has never been in the hands of fewer men. (And yes, they are all men.) The possibilities for reasoned and at least relatively enlightened public discussion—the purpose of magazines like the one you’re reading now—seem to be shrinking by the day. How are we to continue to have a democracy (which relies, at least in theory, on informed public opinion) given such an etiolated public sphere—one that seems to have been deliberately poisoned? These will be among the concerns and questions of “The Last Days of Discourse.”

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A recent conversation with a friend online reminded me that I should attend more closely to what the tech-right thinks about race and gender. In the past, I’ve used the concept of reactionary modernism to describe the worldview of the tech-libertarian right, a combination of a dedication to technological progress with a reactionary social vision. This is not a mere amalgamation, but the belief that technological progress requires an authoritarian order. The fundamental belief of Thiel, et. al. is that the civil rights movement and feminism are actively fettering the advancement of technology. They think that the government and society became focused on coddling women and minorities and did not elevate the types of white men who could bring us into the future. This is combined with a disdain for their own products: the line coming out of the Silicon Valley right-wing avant-garde is now, “Enough with all this e-commerce and social media platforms stuff, they’ve turned people into passive consumers and our engineers into pacifist weenies, we must start building real things again, particularly arms.” The implication is that the society S.V. has built is self-indulgent and overly feminine. It must correct itself by moving away from building consumer-facing goods for the market and moving towards building capital-intensive machinery for the state.

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Speaking of social media, I was recently looking at Dylan Riley’s fascinating book The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe again. Riley is a critic of the “fascism thesis” because he believes that fascism arose out of situations in Europe where there was dense civic association combined with a weak political class, unable to exercise hegemony—national political leadership—while in contemporary America we have a hollowed-out civic life and an atomized population. But this passage jumped out at me:

“For the purposes of understanding fascism, the possibility that civil society might develop in the absence of a hegemonic politics is very important. Gramsci calls these situations “Organic Crises,” which he defines as decisive turning points in which the democratic demands produced by civil society cannot adequately be expressed through existing political institutions. This leads to a crisis of representation in which “the traditional parties, in that particular organizational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class (or fractions of a class) as its expression.” Fascist regimes were the consequences of just such a crisis in which the “traditional parties” and the forces of opposition were outstripped by a rapidly developing civil society. In this context the democratic demands of civil society tend to develop against the regime of political parties and are often expressed as skepticism about all forms of political representation. Fascism, then, develops out of this general crisis of politics. Fascist movements are well adapted to such situations because they claim to transcend the political. These movements are therefore perfectly positioned to exploit the crisis of political representation caused by a situation of civil society overdevelopment in relationship to hegemony. Fascism, a political project aiming to establish a new relationship between the nation and the state, can be expected to emerge where social elites fail to develop hegemonic political organizations in the context of rapid civil society development. The fascist political project arises as an attempt to redress this problem of hegemonic weakness by creating an authoritarian democracy: a regime that claims to represent the people or nation but rejects parliamentary institutional forms. Rather than being connected to a specific stage of economic development, or a specific state form, fascism must be understood as the result of a political crisis rooted in the combined and uneven development of civil society and hegemony.

This idea of “combined and uneven development of civil society and hegemony” is key to understanding the present. Now, we are accustomed to thinking that the Internet and social media platforms are atomizing people and dissolving civic ties, but it’s also binding and associating people in new ways. What if instead of a civic decline we understood the social media world as the rapid development of new forms of civil association, a development so rapid and explosive that the political elite has trouble adapting? This would explain a great deal of empirical facts of the present situation: From the fractured media environment to businessmen ascending to political leadership. It would also fit in with the conception I wrote about yesterday of civil society attacking the state, which is literally what is happening: a private businessman—the biggest private businessman in the world—is taking a hatchet to the state apparatus.