A Million Presents, One Future
Has June Signaled a Pivot Toward Normalcy?
Urbanized societies are nearly always heading in several directions at once. The accidents of economic biochemistry - technology, weather, natural resources, international trade advantages, national security, cultural norms, animal spirits - which bound and infuse a polity may occasionally produce conditions strongly favoring a move in one direction - a steady wind, encouraging all ships to glide along the same path; these eras are brief. More often, the winds are chaotic; family fortunes rise and fall within the spans of a few generations; bourgeois or patrician ennui fosters constant flirtation with taboos and depravity, undermining the moral legitimacy of traditions and giving rise to a culture of hypocrisy; and at no moment can one say for certain how long the republican order will last - Caesar may rise tomorrow, or in a hundred years from now.1
The entire Covid Era has been such a moment. Above all, it has been a moment in which the very question of what it means to “be” in the Covid Era has had no single answer. If one were to drag the viewfinder over the map of America at any point in time between the Two Marches, the very “being” of the Pandemic™ itself would disappear and reappear. Within some parts of the map, there either was never such a thing as a shutdown, or the shutdown was so brief that it passed like a dream, leaving no mark on the collective memory.2 Within other parts, of course, the shutdown yet endures in forms de jure and de facto today, even if these are just symbolic political and cultural footholds retained in expectation of near-term reemployment.
So we have always been living through two American Pandemics: one, in which society at large has given itself over to a surveillance state culture, and eagerly anticipates some form of ratification of the new Autocracy of the Experts; the other, in which life is normal in the immediate, and incredibly strange in the remote (in that they are sharing a country with millions of fellow-voters who eagerly anticipate ratification of the Autocracy of the Experts, while being relentlessly pilloried by the media representatives of those same fellow-voters for the crime of having healthy Vitamin D levels). We have been a continental Berlin - one whose great invisible wall, when viewed from above, looks as knotted and furling and unfurling as the DNA of those same human cells which have been officially decreed incompetent, and in need of new management.
Thus all that has meaningfully happened as concerns the national “story” since this March, the second March, is that the wall has contracted and fractured; There is No-Pandemic’s borders now encompass many former There is a-Pandemic residents (they prefer to refer to their own conquered territory as There was a-Pandemic). The dissonance is the same; the contours have merely become lopsided in opposite the favor as the first March. Nonetheless, the changes arriving in the second half of this June, even though they contain echoes of the first June, feel different.
3Concretely, there has been a sudden reversal of signals on lockdowns and vaccine passports, which were positive (favoring the lengthening of lockdowns, and the instituting of passports) in the beginning of the month, but over the last week have become mixed. The Council of the European Union still maintains their official list of Kosher vaccines, as well as their recommendation that population vaccination percentages be one of the swans counted when divining whether to open travel from particular foreign tribes; but several individual European governments recently announced that they do not intend to require vaccination status from travelers, or inquire on the subject at all (but some will still sin-tax the unvaxxed with Covid testing requirements; and others take care to remind travelers that these determinations can change at any moment - Spain’s announcement of free travel on June 24 includes an online/app registration requirement, so that travelers can be more efficiently alerted of future reversals of their privileges).
All of this despite the evidence that large swaths of America remain crammed with Neanderthal Thinkers firmly resolved to retain their status as “Covid biohazards” - or maybe because of this obstinacy. Does this signify a surrendering, by our elites, of the prospect of a sprawling QR-code-regulated immunological caste system? If the great unvaxxed masses and the travel-dependent corporations and national economies - who might have tried compelling vaccine-compliance by withholding their bounties - have been engaged in a game of chicken, the latter seem to be veering off the dashed line. Simultaneously, the Euro Cup has presented European governments with the reality-check that civic freedom in industrialized societies is a cat which must either be kept entirely within a bag or without. Men who watch sports will get drunk and punch each other, often without considering their vaccination status beforehand.
And abstractly, June has just had a certain energy. Summer is by its physical nature favorable to novelty and forgetfulness; to embodiment; to liberation from stifling constraints. A repeat of summer 2020’s sudden abandonment of Quarantine-at-Home-pretense should not be surprising; and yet, that is how it feels. The recent appearance of photos of mask-less New Yorkers at parks; the notorious images of triumphant elite intimacy produced by the G7 summit (oddly sandwiched by solemn, robotic ceremonies of fealty to the Holy Meter of Protection); the incredible normalcy of the images from the disaster at Surfside (Florida has of course long been part of There is No-Pandemic; but there is something universally and timelessly Globalized America about the sight of survivors and rescue-workers wandering the remains of a collapsed concrete building against a discordantly peaceful backdrop, unmasked) - these startling images point to a future where the currency of the autocratic and agoraphobic Covid Era precedent is irrevocably devalued by rapid-onset amnesia, as likewise befell the autocratic, agoraphobic precedent of the War on Terror.4
In other words, a future where the resumed pivot toward autocracy during the vaccine roll-out - the very thing that prompted me to start this journal just a few days ago - is flattened and then swallowed by the withdrawing surf of crowd-think. This, of course, is the weakness of every manifestation of Cassandra syndrome over potential autocracy that stems from Constitutional originalism (as opposed to institutionalist anti-populism). Those who warn that the roof is going to fall whenever government actors are seen swapping bricks around in the foundation may be wrong over and over; does that make it a bad idea to restore the guardrail that used to be in place? The idealist anarcho-libertarian is in an even worse position; he recognizes that while the guardrail was elegant in concept, it was never more than a symbolic barrier. All the government actors ever need do is convince the crowd at large that immediate survival depends on removing bricks X-Y right now; the crowd will rush to clear away the guardrail themselves.5 All constitutions are paper tigers. Nothing truly confines the power of the state except the collective conception of the frontier of possible state power. Late June has provided signs that that frontier is contracting.
But one should never mistake the collective conception of the frontier of possibility for the frontier of possible conceptions. The former is definite, but variable; the latter does not exist. The power of inertia to insulate human norms from disruption is incredible; the power of Tom Hanks posting a photograph of a used latex glove trapped atop an improperly-set plastic bin liner is greater. History will diagnose the fall of our Republic, when it happens, with determinant narratives.6 There are always a million present-day realities in an urbanized republic; too many for its own future to contain forever. At some point the scope of reality narrows. The resulting aperture is not wide enough to contain both civic liberty and civic order.
For now, our public officials and media overlords still retain their symbolic footholds, in expectation of reemployment.
Here my introduction is derailed enough. But of course, while the inevitability of Caesar in response to economic and cultural disruption is true, it is also false. Republicanism itself is, above all, a tool for the (orderly) creation of artificial economic winds, and though these winds may be anemic in comparison with the wild squalls of “productive disruption” or the rare seasons of robust, steady natural winds, they are constant. This is the mechanism by which republicanism achieves that particular rebellion-suppressing subjective legitimacy which is euphemised as the “consent of the governed” - even when, as in the long-ago dismantled Madisonian ideal, the system has been calibrated to ensure that most of the political energies spent to manufacture such artificial winds will cancel each other out and produce no meteorological fruit.
Further, a hypocritical bourgeois / patrician culture can nonetheless brace the rot within its foundation, retain homogeny, and perpetuate forward through generations, even despite demographic disruption - particularly if her poets and authors, out of an insecurity over the financial health of their estates, are more sympathetic to the anemic winds of republican patronage than to those choppy seas seemingly destined to swallow them up. Thus the satire of -4th-Century Aristophanes and 19th-Century Samuel Butler do not defy the stasis of their hypocritical bourgeois / patrician cultures so much as construct schematic proofs of their beneficial, moderating qualities: “Our society’s form of middle class / elite hypocrisy works; we have become excellent at it, and our excellent practice of it not only guardrails against extremism, but is what distinguishes us from those of poor birth.” Of course, Athens was at the same time lacking in any political guardrails against extremism, just as was Rome in the era of the Empire; it is interesting that the patrician instinct for ethical rationalization of the status quo, as a bid for cultural moderation and as a means of cultural tokenizaton of good breeding, seems capable of self-generating and perpetuating even outside of the republican framework, when the “status quo” for outspokenly moderate patricians is that dying of natural causes is the exception, not the rule.
Thus, there is always a path from the unstable republic of renewal, growth, death, decay, repeat, to the inert, zombie welfare state; if energy is removed from the system gradually enough, it can arrive to Off Mode without prompting a meltdown. The modern “free world” is well over half-way to displacing the capricious zephyrs of pure capitalism with the stolid breezes of socialism, corporate welfare, and institutional media hegemony; at the same time, her cultural norms could not be characterized by greater Balkanization, instability, or incompatibility to the happiness of the common man. Hollywood satire in particular has been, with some exceptions, sour and spiteful ever since it was penetrated by the progressivist mindset - contrast the gentle, affectionate lampooning of upper class hypocrisy in Philadelphia Story with the nihilistic contemptuousness of middle class hypocrisy in Harper Valley PTA. The behavioral signal communicated by every such Hollywood depiction of norm-desire friction in the last half a century has been not “flaunt the norm this one time, but behold and ever remember what a beneficial norm it is, and enforce it among your children,” but, “destroy the norm, ruin your neighbors’ lives, and fly off in a helicopter with a man who can afford to repair the harms later realized by your aberrant choices.”
This regional dissonance was not merely a surrogate for Trumpism vs anti-Trumpism. In the many Blue region neighborhoods and cities blighted by civic disorder, the performance of There Is a-Pandemic culture is either impossible or critically incoherent: If you are stabbed or kicked on the sidewalk by a mentally-ill parolee, but both of you are nonetheless wearing masks to protect each other from an invisible plague, the signal as regards Authoritarian Bio-Surveillance Statism is decidedly ambiguous. And the early summer was nothing if not a self-administering among citizens of heavily Blue regions of a hall-pass to flaunt the lockdown mandates which at no point were formally revoked. This ambiguous revolt briefly stranded the participants of the media Theatre of the State (a.k.a. our elected officials) as the only ones who were still taking Covid “seriously.” It appeared, throughout June, that the collective mandate for a ratification of the Autocracy of the Elites had evaporated; and the media’s returned focus on Covid in early July had the same artificially alarmist tone that characterized early May. The Covid “surge” in mid-July (unsurprisingly prompted by ending adherence to lockdowns which were not at any point eliminating SARS-CoV-2, only lengthening its inevitable proliferation; and unsurprisingly non-lethal, as it was primarily among the not-at-risk groups who had postponed their exposure in the spring via unnecessary isolation) at last prompted a mass return to surveillance state mentality among citizens in Blue regions, as expressed by a redoubled fervor for the most patently useless of the expert-delivered mitigation orthodoxies, outdoor masking, and the most ostentatiously harmful, school closures.
An amnesia which, despite its benefits - the devaluation of the currency of a given autocratic precedent - was most tragically evinced by the left’s immediate willingness in 2020 to allow establishment of a new autocratic precedent out of whole-cloth, and over the absurd and un-voidable pretext that elderly and unhealthy people might experience disease, because humans are not immortal. Jeez, somebody should tell the Founders that their pretty, abstract “negative rights” are obsolete in these unfathomably apocalyptic modern times - take your liberty and shove it, Patrick Henry, there’s bedridden octogenarians sustaining their lives via around-the-clock air temperature regulation and environmental hyper-sterilization who might get sneezed on!
The communitarian counters that there is no end-point to libertarian governance that would not lead to a greater ability of media- and corporate-constructed hyperreality to supplant embodied, localized reality. The state may not get to define the premise and form of its descent into autocracy - anti-terrorist, anti-plague, anti-ethnicity-X - but it will still benefit from the private sector’s creation of pretext.
Just as the media has already seized upon every perfunctory and commonplace documentation of concrete rot preceding the collapse at Champlain condos, equating violation of regulation with established physical causation - not that the narrative that this building is only a canary in a local geographic coal mine has been completely shut out. The narrative-constructing ego is seemingly habituated to explain the misfortune of others by asking what rules they violated; even as in the present, we are all violating a hundred rules in our daily lives as a matter of course. (“Determinant” is a noun, but should also be an adjective. It seems to be the only construction of “Determ-” that matches the connotation I mean to use here.)