This is the end of running on the waves; we are poured out like water.
Most historians will agree that no single factor can explain the collapse, disintegration or fracturing of a complex political system. As the US faces its most lethal crisis since the 1860s, there is one factor that can help explain what might be its last days as a Union of 50 States. In his book
Legitimation Crisis (1973) Habermas goes into some detail to explore the problems embedded in three overlapping spheres : the Political, the Economic and the Socio-Cutural. What we have here is thus a crisis of Legitimacy, and one that the US has faced before.
The difference this time is that I see no resolution to the crisis that can be effective in retaining the 'mass loyaty' to the Republic that is -or was- fundamental to the endurance of the Union.
In the 19th century, Slavery was nominally the dividing issue, though at a deeper level, it was the Plantation Economy of the Southern States that was obstructing the capitalist development that by the end of the century would create one of the three most dynamic econmies in the world.
The 1860s thus became the interregnum between the Old World of Colonial America, and the emergence of the New World of prosperity and freedom, albeit one that by 1899 had re-incorporated acoss the defunct Confederacy the 'soft' version of slavery known as Segregation, a compromise the North made with the South to compensate it for its losses.
In the 21st century, legitimacy is the thread that once binded, and may yet undo the Republic.
Historians will look back in amazement that a man so obviously ignorant and stupid, became the standard bearer of an alternative narrative that has repudiated both the values, and the practices that sustained the US since its revolution against the British Empire in 1776. The key to unlocking this enigma, is not so hard to find -it is precisely because Donald Trump is an ignorant man, and an incompetent manager, that those men and women with their own agenda, have played him like a puppet to obtain their cherished goal -permanent and unlimited power.
Most observers do not believe the 2020 election produced anything other than a just result, but the narrative that has submerged the result in 'controversy' is more than an act of resentment by a man and his supporters who can't believe and can't accept he lost.
It has become a litmus test of politics that has challenged the legitmacy not just of the election process, but of the whole of the US political system.
Just as it was said during the Terror of the French Revolution 'Ten men can make ten thousand tremble', so in the US, a minoity of people -roughly 30%, but a larger percentage of elected officials and their allies in the media, have undermined the US with their relentless attacks on the legitimacy of the outcome of the election, but in extension the voting system, the economy, and a range of socio-culural issues stamped with 'Made in America' with Racism and Gender Anxiety central issues in a narrative of Decline, which has as its only solution, what in effect is a new Revolution.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a semi-professional agitator, tweeted '1776' in relation to the attack on the US on January 6 2021, but not as comedy or satire. Critically, a blatant attack such as this, manifestly opposed to the spirit and the letter of the Constitution, marks out this event as one rupture in the fabric of the US which, as the Eagles and Vultures seem determined to do, may yet tear the US apart.
To re-configure the violence of January 6 as a Liberation not an Attack, allies all those who promote this with a key factor in any legitimation crisis -the breakdown of mass loyalty into violence, whether it is the actual violence of street protests resuting in casualties -Charlottesville or Kenosha- or the implied violence of Paul Gosar's lurid cartoon in which a democratically elected member of the House of Representatives is executed, as if there was no alternative means of de-electing her from office.
The most chilling example of this came a month or so ago in Idaho, when a member of the audience at an event organized by Turning Point USA said-
“When do we get to use the guns? ... That's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie...y-can-use-guns
When the only response to a crisis of legitimacy is violence, there is an exsitential threat to the system as a whole. That it comes from somoene who probably votes for a party that has been using State law to remove millions of Americans from the electoral register, to deny them the opportunity to vote on election day, underlines the scope of the crisis, just as the comments by Senator Rafael 'Ted' Cruz on the secession of Texas cannot be dismissed as an offhand remark, but a statement of intent.
Thus one can draw up a list of such statements and actions, and link them to the violation of the law by Donald Trump as candidate in 2016 (the Federal Election Campaign Act), as President (the Hatch Act), and the insolent repudiation of the rule of the law and the Congress of the United States by fomer members of the Trump administration investigating the seditious attack on the US on January 6.
Taken collectively, the argument proposed by the Neo-Revolutionaries is this:
-the Constitution of the USA is not fit for purpose;
-the Separation of Powers no longer enables the US to function as an efficient administation and legislative body;
-the Rule of Law has been 'hi-jacked' by sectional interests at the expense of the 'American people'.
But the legtimation crisis begs the question, 'Who are the American people?' with the suspicion that just as Fascism in the early 20th century sought to define, and then re-define the Nation and those who belong in it, so the Neo-Revolutionaries can be seen as New Wave Fascists, determined to replace one system with another.
And because this campaign cannot command the support of the majority of the people, but has support in the old Confederacy, so the prospects of the Union of 50 states breaking up must be taken seriously if, as is claimed, re-districting provides supporters of Donald Trump with permanent power in those States opposed to the US as it is, a US they have come to hate and despise.
And just, as James Buchanan declined to use force to reclaim South Carolina when it seceded in 1860, one wonders if force would again be used, or declined, were Texas to secede from the Union.
The stage is set for a showdown as the New Wave Fascsts force their ageda on the US, not because they don't believe the US belongs to 'We the People' but because they want to re-define who the people are before committing to them.
There is a crisis of legitimacy in the US, and I fear it will not be resolved in the favour of the US as it is today. The US is running on water.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...committee-1860
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/...rst-president/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legiti..._Crisis_(book)
This is the end of running on the waves; we are poured out like water.