The Future, Suspended Above Our Heads

Thoughts on an election day

It’s election day here in Qatar and, of course, in the United States as well. In Qatar, the election concerns a referendum to (this is complicated) approve an initiative by the emir to halt elections to an advisory council. So it’s voting on a referendum to remove elections to a consultative body. And everyone agrees it’s likely to pass and seems wise besides. This is, fundamentally, a small country without any of the ordinary functional needs for democracy—it’s possible to accommodate the interests of the powerful and the needs of the less powerful without elections, and in those kinds of circumstances elections can create problems of their own. Institutions should fit the country.

It’s notable, of course, because Qatar is a country firmly of the future, and it’s always interesting to know what is and isn’t viewed as essentially modern where people take such conversations seriously. Democracy as we’ve known it recently may not be an essential aspect of a modern country. Other means of rulership will endure and perhaps flourish.

In the United States, democracy may be on the ballot more directly. I doubt, by the way, that elections will ever end in the United States; even after Augustus became princeps, the Senate remained—the last consular titles would last another half millennium. Yet one can have healthier or sicker democracies; in the United States, a flourishing of multiracial democracy took almost exactly a hundred years from the Civil War to emerge. Men (and a woman, and dogs) have traveled to space for longer than the entire United States guaranteed all its citizens access to the ballot.

If one views the United States as, in its essence, a multiracial, multiethnic, last best hope of mankind, the institutions that suit that country are considerably newer than the Constitution. The political order prescribed by the Constitution was in no way democratic, even if it made room for elections; it was republican, to be sure, but a republic of a kind that no American is really fitted to by temperament or tradition. Two hundred years of democratizing and broadening leaves a culture without the codes of honor and modes of property that would enable any sort of return to the order that Washington envisioned. One could overturn the institutions we have now, but in the absence of those guardrails we would be left with a weak, thin, angry, and violent political order.

I often speak of the importance of resisting categorical thinking as dispositive. Categories set the bounds within which we place phenomena: between this temperature and that temperature, it’s warm; between some other range of temperatures, it’s cold. Yet anyone in Doha can tell you that both 90 degrees Fahrenheit (my phone, at least, is set to that temperature scale) and 110 degrees Fahrenheit are “hot”, but you’d much rather be in one “hot” temperature than another. Similarly, the United States may long remain democratic, as measured by whether elections take place, but the difference in quality between the democracy of 1905 Alabama and 2024 Virginia is something to behold.

In the same way, you can have degrees of violent conflict in a country. Tim Burke discusses some of this in a post today (well, I received it today) and it pairs well with a discussion I had in real life recently. One imagines a civil war as masses of men in blue and gray (not coincidentally the colors of my employer) headed off to set-piece battle, but this is, as any student of political violence knows, far too limited. Mexico’s experience of endemic local political violence today is one example that falls below the threshold of “civil war”, but one can hardly deny it matters; then there is the use of violence by groups for mixtures of social, economic, and political boundary-keeping, like the Peep O’Day boys of Ulster in the eighteenth century and the resulting Catholic Defenders, which helped impart Irish politics with a longstanding strain of extralegal and at times parastatal violence.

America yields to few other countries in its history of political violence, and such practices were long both an essential part of the apartheid order of the segregated South and a less-commented but pervasive feature of the West and East. (Sundown towns existed in a great many places where racial equality was the law.) When the authorities permit reactionary violence, it will flourish and then become a part of the background—always shaping behavior but rarely wielded, and yet all the more efficient for that. The idea that a government with a winking, or more than a winking, attitude toward reactionary violence could abet a return to such tendencies should not be scoffed at.

And, at other times and places, the authorities have recruited members of police forces and other security forces from the ranks of the vigilante and the streetfighter, adding official sanction to their acts rather than imposing any sort of control.

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain, Shakespeare wrote, in Hamlet.

One may vote, and vote, and be unfree.

Cyclical patterns of historical narrative impose a hope of future progress at the deepest moment of historical retreat. In the long run, any condition will pass. In the long run. It is cold comfort to anyone watching the Visigoths sack Rome to know that one day in the future Germans will visit as peaceful tourists. If the institutions in which we have come up were to fall, perhaps one day something like them could be rebuilt. Cold comfort.

The task of political work is to build a polity we want to live in, not to assiduously hope that eventually all will sort itself out. Forgiveness has its place, but defenses of a political order must balance individual reconciliation with the need for a firm rebuilding of that order. If Trump is defeated today, then action to shore up the political order must be firmer, faster, and less tender than the period after January 6. The rot has set in much further than it had then.

When the foundations of an institution prove unable to support the weight of society, the foundations must at least be repaired, and we must also consider whether it might be time to construct a new edifice altogether. One might even say it is important to build back better.