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a thread of unknown length. im not hollering at anyone specific. this is mostly a stream of consciousness. theres a through-line wrt history and tensions abt instrumentalizing democracy but i dont have the energy to formalize this. apologies in advance for the disorder. https://twitter.com/ntdPhD/status/1302269056163209218
how do you cover the first arsonist-in-chief? how do you contextualize the behavior of a venal, lawbreaking idiot who has no use for normative pleasantries within the narrative arc of US history? the media craps the bed constantly, but academic PS has, in my view, also struggled.
there is blame aplenty. the americanists forget their history, the theorists have all been killed off, the comparativists shout unhelpfully about cross-national analogies that only weakly apply if you squint, and the IR folks idk:
we're barreling toward the end of the second reconstruction and ppl think spells the *end of democracy.* (per the NYT article, but the genre more generally). but this is a narrow evaluation that disregards the ebbs and flows of democracy w/in US and across other democracies.
democracy persists in existential crisis. "how democracies die" illustrates this quite well but its also, imo, muddled how we understand the nature of democracy wrt "democratic backsliding." i am a quantitative social scientist, i like to instrumentalize the qualities of things.
however, few students of democracy agree on walking definitions of it. free elections, rights, whatever. by several operationalizations, the US is not a "full" "democracy" until 1965. and yet when ppl speak about the present "crisis" it seems that they forget this history.
this matters wrt how we think and talk about backsliding as applied to the US case. if you have periods of relative peace but you've incarcerated millions of americans and income inequality has spiraled out of control -- what are you backsliding from?
or take something like y'all-qaeda and the ecosystem of right-wing militia groups openly demonstrating in the US. is this materially or normatively different than the KKK parading about in the 60s? not sure. the present *seems* particularly restless. but what the freedom summer?
the US also doesn't neatly fit into cross-national comparisons where despots have hijacked democracy. the GOP (eg WI) and Trump are certainly lawless, but i struggle to fit backsliding-dynamics into the US when its clear that we've historically oversold domestic democraticness!
there's a difference between putting your head in the sand and saying "it cant happen here" and saying "look this shit is complicated, democracy has been messy, but its unlikely an arsonist can burn it all to the ground." we should be appropriately worried, and yet.
the trump presidency has revealed the fragility of law-abiding-ness. this is worrying for lots of reasons. but speculating that like, whoopee he's not leaving office if he loses seems bananas to me.
like, otoh, i want to recognize that an arsonist president is new, bad. otoh, the country fractured in two and we're still picking up those pieces. this is a complicated conversation to have, but the "doomsday prepping" genre is not only not helping, but grounded in junk history.
