Doctorow on 'systems thinking' and fascism

Earlier today community member MikeC posted an essay pondering whether the Democratic Party counts as "controlled opposition," as opposed to a truly oppositional party. It's worth discussion; for my part I think my answer might be "not yet, but it sure seems to be inching towards it?" Trying to tease out the mechanisms by which Democrats seem to be so consistently (sigh) failing the moment is at this point an omnipresent political discussion, and so far I haven't seen any one theory gain broad acceptance.

Focusing in on that same question today, Cory Doctorow also has a brief essay today about “systems thinking” and our fascist moment. What if the problem isn't the Democrats being insufficiently oppositional; what if, instead, Democratic leaders are compulsively focusing their opposition on the wrong part of the system?

In Thinking in Systems, [Donella Meadows] presents a hierarchy of leverage points for changing a system, ranked from least effective ("Constants, numbers, parameters") to most ("The power to shift paradigms to deal with new challenges"):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55264856861/

In all, Meadows theorizes 12 different "places to intervene in a system." The least effective of these – constants like taxes and standards, negative and positive feedback loops – are the sites of most of our political fights, and rightly so. They are the fine-tuning knobs of the system that adjust its margins. Once you have the rule of law ("the rules of the system"), you can drive change by amending, repealing or passing a law:

https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

But when you're confronted with a system that is significantly, persistently dysfunctional, you will likely have to work at sites that are further up the hierarchy, such as "the distribution of power over the rules of the system" or "the goals of the system"; or the most profound of all, "the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises."

So in this framework, fascism is operating at the highest levels of the system, altering the very premises of our politics; in response, Democratic opposition continues to fiddle with narrow, technical responses to individual problems as they arise rather than engaging with that broader, systemic manipulation.

Or, as metaphor: Democrats are attempting to repair the workings of an intricate machine while fascists are systemically changing the very functions of the machine. The fascists are trying to turn a textile factory into a weapons factory; the Democrats, fretting, think that if they optimize loom productivity the fascists will give up and leave.

I'm broadly sympathetic to most of the different theories for these, ahem, gelatinous responses by Democrats to the current autocratic attacks on our democracy itself, but the explanations I myself always come back to are these:

1. There is an intentional conspiracy on the part of major media companies to boost oligarchic systems and discredit democratic ones.

I don’t mean anything particularly under-the-table about “conspiracy”; I mean that the executives and ownership of media companies are broadly pro-oligarch because they are the oligarchs, and they all hang out together and hire each other and nod at each other's bon mots. So there is a systems-wide pressure, which has come to a head with the Bari Weiss absurdities and which can be seen in stark-naked clarity in the terror-stricken media coverage of Zohran Mamdani, to inflate scandals on the democratic side (Biden senile!) while intentionally covering up far worse on the pro-oligarch side. (Epstein's accomplices; Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state.) Democrats do not have the same ability to control media narratives that Republicans do not because Democrats are inherently inept but because media companies are, quite intentionally, working to block those narratives.

You don't need to look any farther than The Washington Post's newly revamped op-ed pages to see how broadly this trend has advanced. At this point, it's advancing like a creature from a cheap horror movie.

2. The corruption in the U.S. Congress has at this point rendered the body nonfunctional.

Not really a debate to be had on this one, either. Republicans have openly embraced administrative corruption. They think it’s great. They don't care if the Trumpites impound funds, steal funds, steal entire buildings, or anything else so long as they think they can stay on the winning side of it.

In addition to the near-infinite known scandals of the Trump 2 era, I expect we will eventually learn that similar financial grifts, near-open bribery, and other illegal acts are even more commonplace in the House and Senate than we think. This would be a corollary of Doctorow’s premise; Republicans are no longer playing the same game that their predecessors were. They don’t believe in democracy. They don’t want democracy. They don’t think crimes by their allies are bad, or that stopping crimes by their allies is good, or that bending U.S. policies so as to best please Jared Kushner's foreign financiers even rises to the level of mildly problematic. But their Democratic counterparts are still playing by the old rules, because Republicans insist that they must. Indeed, the slightest deviation from the old rules is treated as a scandal if Democrats attempt it, even as Republicans insist that they themselves can crime their way to power.

The Supreme Court has, similarly, become brazenly corrupt. It is a partisan court first, foremost, and always. It cannot seriously be argued otherwise, as much as Chief Justice John Roberts still halfheartedly attempts to try.

I needn't argue the point; Justice Sotomayor has done it skillfully in multiple dissents, including the dissent to the latest Court manipulations meant to ensure that Republicans can change election maps in multiple states while the voting is underway after the court's shocking and purely partisan dismantling of voting rights.

Because the media’s ownership class is allied with these Republican effort, this "corruption for me, fake scandal for thee" works. Republican corruption goes unchecked, and Republican corruption also manufactures flimsy or outright false claims of corruption from small-d democrats (See: Hunter Biden; organized “antifa”; attacks on higher education; “DEI” as racism against dull-minded white guys) that gain the sort of broad media traction that the sitting president’s longtime alliance with a child sex trafficker and alleged participation in that trafficking never has. It’s a corruption of the very idea of democratic rule; an authoritarian attack on shared reality meant to deprive voters of any semblance of informed democratic consent.

You can see it on the Supreme Court itself, as well. Sotomayor felt the need to apologize for making a mildly critical observation about Justice Kavanaugh; meanwhile, conservative justices openly call for the destruction of liberalism, lie about the known facts of cases they decide, and make comments from the bench that make it clear their brains have been boiled into soup from far-right conspiracy sites.

3. Democratic House and Senate members are, by and large, increasingly decrepit relics of a long era of relative political stability in which there were shared values on both sides of the aisle.

It was until recently agreed on, if begrudgingly, that the president should not be openly corrupt. The notion that Congress had the ability to check the Executive—and a willingness to do so—was broadly understood. The idea that a president would rally a violent mob to attack lawmakers was so farfetched as to be, literally, inconceivable. The biggest issues of the day were always “energy policy” or “deficits” or squeezing more money for your state out of the latest infrastructure bill, dull political things performed by dull political routines.

Republicans have abandoned those frameworks, but the Democrats we elected to office have repeatedly fumbled the responses because they campaigned and entered office thinking they were being elected to do the dull political routines of the Clinton-Bush-Obama eras. That's what they signed up for. That's the era that formed their political beliefs, the one that informed their strategies and honed their one-liners for.

They did not run for office thinking they would be assassination targets after an opposition party’s president gave a speech seemingly endorsing it. They didn’t run for office thinking they were going to be surrounded by people who could see $50,000 change hands in a fast food bag, or multiple of their colleagues accused of sexual assault, or a president making literal billions by marketing scamcoins, and claim with full conviction that these things are all just fine now.

So our elected leaders broke. Their brains broke. We elected people who wanted to be technocrats, who then themselves put the most long-serving technocrats into leadership roles, and it has proved impossible for most of their self-promoting, election-brained, consultant-reliant minds to pivot to non-technocratic responses. They simply don't have it in them.

You wouldn't summon a world-renowned pop star to fix your house's plumbing; those are two completely different skillsets. Honing one skill doesn't give you the slightest bit of insight into the other.

Similarly, you can't expect someone who has stewed for a lifetime in the language of technocracy to know how to put out the fires of despotism. We need a different breed of Democratic leaders, ones who speak the language of opposition. Ones who can condemn demagogues as demagogues, and call fascists fascists, and call weird rich nutcases "weird," full stop. Republicans are changing the game by asserting that Democrats are evil, anti-Christian creatures bent on doing America harm. Democrats could easily turn that weapon back on them: We have seen just how malicious, amoral, and wantonly destructive Republicans have proven to be. We can prove the Republican sins that Republicans have built up an entire mythology to cover up.

But if current Democratic leaders had such skills, we would have seen it by now. They don't. Joe Biden didn't; Barack Obama doesn't. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz came the closest to speaking this new language of morality and public fairness when, during the campaign, he was able to voice the long-absent political opinion that the Republican opposition had devolved into nuttery—but he was quickly muzzled by the sclerotic technocrats of the party so that the campaign could settle back into more familiar technocratic ground.

So there are at least three different, tangled problems here. The first is that the national media has been consolidated to the point at which a relative handful of companies, all governed by the same quasi-aristocratic class, can and do manipulate national narratives to the point of near-hegemony. It was true back when alt-weeklies arrived on scene to challenge the too-corporate versions; it is much more true now.

The second is the systems-level problem; Republicanism is now, intentionally, a kleptocratic movement that opposes democracy itself—definitionally fascist, using the rigor of democratic systems as weapon to break those systems.

The third is that the opposition party is a group of largely self-interested political players who came to power playing one political game and find themselves hopelessly unable to adapt to a new era in which none of that glad-handing and favor-trading means a damn thing, because the opposition has no use for a system in which they are even allowed to exist.

If you ask me what's going to happen next, based on all of those things, I see no answer other than chaos. Chaos is the only way forward: Oligarchic brunchlords are pushing economic systems to the brink of collapse, seemingly believing that the unwashed masses will not seek vengeance when it happens. Our elections are rapidly devolving into chaos—now that rigging the maps for partisan gain has been explicitly endorsed by the Supreme Court, not only endorsed but with a how-to manual attached, the public will rapidly find the situation ridiculous. They will call these institutions corrupt, and be right, and the federal government will lose legitimacy in ways that can't easily be repaired.

And either the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or both are going to hit extinction-level polling numbers as that happens. The Republicans, for destroying the economy in all the ways voters hate most; the Democrats, for being such feckless technocrats that voters—who are mostly uninformed and vibes-based—can't help but suspect that they were acting as Republican accomplices the whole time.

The longer the fever goes without breaking, the more chaotic the nation will become when it finally does. I still do not think Trumpism will be ultimately successful, because as we have learned the far-right allies of Trump (like the Heritage Foundation) are blazingly incompetent fuckups with fetishes for destroying all the parts of the system that the public likes most. Trumpism will not survive a Great Recession caused by rank ideological fuckuppery.

The bad news, of course, is that things are likely to devolve into at least Great Recession levels of fuckuppery before the public becomes sufficiently irate. Congress and the aristocracy will act only when they fear public anger more than they fear Trump's kleptocrats, and we will likely only reach that point after Republicans do such great damage to American finances that it provokes mass demonstrations on a scale the nation has never, ever seen before.