The Meaning of Political Events: An Examination of January 6 as a Crisis of Liberalism
Why liberalism, which conceptualizes society around what we ought not to do instead of what we ought to do, is ideologically insufficient in organizing society
“The power of anti-structure comes also from the sense that all codes limit us, shut us out from something important, prevent us from seeing and feeling things of great moment… All codes need to be countervailed, sometimes even swamped in their negation, on pain of rigidity, enervation, the atrophy of social cohesion, blindness, perhaps ultimately self-destruction.”
— Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
On January 6, 2021, during a joint session of Congress formalizing the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 US Presidential Election, a mob of rioters attacked the US Capitol, propelled by beliefs of a stolen election. The rioters breached Capitol and Washington DC security, looted and vandalized parliament chambers, offices of members of Congress, and Capitol halls. While the overall material damage was meagre, the January 6 insurrection marked the climax of a concerted effort by Donald Trump and allies to overturn the election outcome. Five people died and one hundred and thirty-eight were injured during the attack. Four Capitol Police members committed suicide in the months that followed, reflecting the symbolic and psychological gravitas of the event. How did the transition of power, a cornerstone of liberal democracies with the United States as their beacon, go so badly awry? How did it come that within a decade of the election of the first black president, the United States went from paragon of liberal democracies, to contesting foundational democratic principles like the peaceful transition of power? Why were some Trump-supporting groups and organizations knowingly motivated to disrupt the democratic process? Why were large swaths of his supporters likely to succumb to misinformation and propaganda? What explains the deepening political polarization of the United States public in the last decade?
There are no simple answers to these questions. The Trump phenomenon showed how fragile the political situation was and how political forces festering likely for decades surfaced with his foray into the political scene. I will use the January 6 Capitol attack as the opening frame for the critique of society that follows below because the symbolic reverberations of this event are in proportion with the substantial claims that I will be advancing.
At the time, the event seemed momentous not because of its gravitas, and not because it signaled an imminent collapse of the institutional structure, but because it signified a transgression into the hallowed. In the West, a now by and large secular civilization, the closest things to the sacred are principles and artifacts that underpin the institutional order: the constitution, the separation of powers between the three branches of government, mass suffrage, and the rational justifications upon which these structures purportedly stand. The artifacts are the physical locales wherein these processes take place and are sustained, chief among them the Capitol of the United States. These hallowed traditions are fuelled by the premises of equality, fairness, and justice, all of which are less and less the outputs of the system. Thus, while the event was insignificant in its institutional ramifications at least in the short term, it was significant in that it gestured that these very institutions have suffered a gradual loss of prestige, but also, perhaps, something far graver: that to large segments of the population they exist more so in name than flesh and blood. That is to say, they no longer carry the gravitas of the principles that they purport to instantiate because they no longer approximate or enact them. In other words, the institutions have lost their effectiveness.
The general wisdom contradicts this reading of events. The narrative promulgated by official channels reduces the January 6 attack to the actions of a misguided, misinformed, and disgruntled mob with fringe beliefs doing the bidding of a demagogue with quasi-fascist tendencies. This may touch on the proximate causes, but it omits the distal causes. To reduce this event to its proximal causes would be like diagnosing the patient from a single symptom without taking into account the history of the illness. A proper diagnosis requires a deeper examination of the patient, the patient’s history, and a comparison of the many symptoms which individually may be nonspecific but collectively point to the root causes of the illness. The narrow reading, therefore, chooses to ignore a multitude of symptoms that spring from underlying trends. The narrow reading is also intimately tied with the broader reading of the Trump phenomenon, which sees him as an aberration slipping into political prominence on account of his intrinsic political appeal, fueled, in part, by a cult of personality. And that, in addition to this, Trump masterfully rode a wave of discontent rooted in the demographic direction of the country, emblematized by the Obama presidency, predicated on the fears of some whites of losing their majority status on the one hand, and of being left behind materially by the machinations of meritocracy, on the other. One cannot deny that, in part, these underlying fears found political articulation in Trump. While this reading captures some of the proximate causes, it leaves out others.
The other side of the equation requires acknowledging the massive failures of the Democratic party (as the then incumbent government), but more generally, of the bureaucratic, corporate, and broader elites across the political spectrum. These elite classes have failed for decades to enact necessary reforms to alleviate the burdens of the working and middle classes (namely, the majority of the population who earn their livelihood through wage labour). Not only that, but they have actively thwarted candidates that sought political office premised on enacting such changes. The popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election converged on common promises that spoke directly to working people hoping to substitute effective fiscal reform for placating platitudes. However, in the part of Trump, homage to the plight of the working person was swaddled in nationalistic and racially-charged rhetoric. In spite of this, Trump’s political persona, which flouted and called into question entrenched consensuses on trade and foreign policy, for example, found popular appeal across the population. Therefore, while Trump was far from the working person’s instrument in praxis, at some level of analysis his presidency shook the political establishment and loosened ossified doctrines like NAFTA, while also paradoxically polarizing the country. Because the protectionist policies of the Trump presidency ran counter the orthodoxy of both major parties, they unwittingly revealed the level of political collusion in Washington against the interests of the masses (notwithstanding genuine disagreement about the cost-benefit trade-offs between free-trade and protectionism). At the same time, without saying anything of Trump’s divisive rhetoric and lies, the sheer incompetence and callous disregard for procedure and decorum that marked his administration extended the political decay that had largely been consigned to legislative gridlock and ineffective bureaucracies, to the executive branch. Therefore, while it’s possible that Trump’s political appeal may have been overweening, I’m inclined to ascribe the heft of the blame to unbudging elites on both sides of the political aisle — culminating with Hilary Clinton’s entitled and vapid 2016 presidential campaign, which saw Trump’s nomination as effortless entry into the presidential office. In the intervening years since Trump’s transition out of office, the political establishment has unabashedly reverted to the pre-Trump status quo (though Biden’s administration has made some concessions). This degree of inflexibility from the political establishment will likely translate into far greater political instability in the near future.
These analyses bring us closer to the topic at hand. The political decay that has been taking place for decades at least in the United States, but more broadly across the Western world, has occurred at the heel of massive sociological shifts that have gone, if not unnoticed, then entirely unaddressed by the institutional structures. Elements of these shifts include the dissolution of the family, the erosion of the institution of marriage, the disappearance of organic communities, the more recent commodification of courtship, and a large-scale shift from geographically-bound communities to geographically-untethered online modes of social interaction, not to mention rapid demographic shifts due to immigration that the current political climate makes taboo to address honestly (namely the growing pains of the mixing of cultures). The effects of these shifts are so seismic that the tethering of the rational-legal edifice that underpins Western institutions to social reality has become increasingly tenuous. This is because institutions, their organizing principles, and justifications thereof are not a substitute for society. They are there to regulate society, administer some measure of control, and enforce and support impartial and fair principles that lubricate the social scheme by incentivizing participation. But besides these, they presuppose or take for granted aspects of social cohesion that are not legally or institutionally encoded. I will argue that institutions function precisely because they take for granted non-codified modes of social cohesion. When extra-institutional society erodes, institutions not only lose their footing and effectiveness, but become oppressive, however well-intentioned, moral and rational their organizing principles. This is precisely what has happened and continues to unfold at an alarming rate. The meat of society is being eaten away, leaving behind the bone. The bone is there to support the meat, but without the meat, the bone is dead.
This is not a radical idea, and has been occurring in the West in some form or another at least since the first Industrial Revolution. In fact, the kernel of this idea is contained in the gemeinschaft-gessellschaft dichotomy coined by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. According to Tönnies, social ties can be characterized by two broad categories: gemeinschaft, translating to community, which encompasses direct interactions and the values and beliefs by which they are regulated, and gessellschaft, translating to society, which encompasses interactions regulated by formal rules, impersonal roles and indirect institutional modes of interaction. While I concur that gemeinschaft is largely characterized by direct interaction, and gesellschaft largely indirect, they are not mutually exclusive. Both gemeinschaft and gessellschaft involve direct and indirect modes of social interaction. In fact, in my analysis, gemeinschaft and gessellschaft are synchronously present, and their deeper difference lies in the fact that gemeinschaft operates at a personal level while gesellschaft at the impersonal.
The distinction between community and society in the gemeinschaft-gessellschaft dichotomy loosely mirrors my distinction between uncodified social ties and the institutional structure. When I say uncodified, I do not mean that communities and larger collectives do not operate according to internal norms. Rather that these norms are either implicit or when explicit, not enforced by legal or formal bodies. It is important to acknowledge that at the boundary, this distinction blurs. The ascriptions of formal and informal constitute a continuum. Religious life, for example, occupies an intermediate position between the two. This is because aspects of religious life, whether more grassroots like local parishes that develop their own internal norms, or administrated through a centralized formal body like the Catholic church, ultimately have as their concern the private lives of their members. In fact, religious orders by definition usher the private into the public, that is, they make the personal a social problem and bind the collective through beliefs held in common. This is not to say that religious institutions cannot take the form of impersonal and legalistic bodies divorced from the spiritual concerns of the people. This was precisely the case until the church was alienated from public life through a formal separation of church and state, a process that came about incrementally. This separation, which is later internalized by liberalism, is deeply contrary to the intrinsic aim of religion. Namely, that it seeks to unite collectives under a common set of beliefs. The metaphysical claims of religion (at least Abrahamic ones) are at variance with their estrangement from political life. The sharp separation of the private and public spheres in Western society emerged in part from the relegation of religion to the private sphere.
While many of the social functions of religion were replaced by secular institutions, and religion’s foothold on an overarching narrative binding collectives ceded to scientific enterprise, its more amorphous functions found no substitute in modern industrialized society organized according to Weberian legal-rational principles. This is because religions in general supply a holistic ideological framework to the collectives they organize, linking a cosmogony, namely the overall order of the universe, with the destiny of a people, thereby investing quotidian life with direction and cosmic context. As holistic frameworks, religions codify aspects of human experience that techno-rational society lacks the tools to identify, name, and thereby fulfil. For example, the emotional lives of individuals and groups, replete with suffering, failure and uncertainty, find articulation within church dogma. The radical contingency of life finds catharsis and mitigation in congregation. Functionally, church dogma performs this regulative role. Further, congregation orients a social body toward the mystery of existence (this mystery remains unassailable from scientific theory because it is akin to an affective experience of awe). Even so, religions merely delineate the general contours of social existence which ultimately sits atop a far deeper and uncodified sociality, which is too amorphous and implicit to be articulated, and emerges as the byproduct of prolonged contiguous and local coexistence. This implicit lore emerges organically from traditional communal life and is exhibited in modes of interaction that are too nuanced and minute to be controlled or engineered. Religious cults always arise or become appropriated in dalliance with these informal local realities.
As a factor of social order, therefore, religion succeeds at something that the current institutional order does not: regulating personal life as a function of communal life. Our personal lives are measured against some social standard, and religion functioned to connect the personal to that social standard at scale. Present institutions are wholly indifferent to this calibration function that connects the context of work with the context of meaning or wider social purposiveness. Today quotidian drudgery partakes in sustaining a social body whose members are increasingly not rewarded with a personal life rooted in communal ties. For clarity’s sake, personal operationalizes to the formation of the nuclear family and communal to the connection of that nuclear family to a larger web of personal relations whether kin-related or not. As regards the pejorative connotations of rootedness: I do not ever employ it to essentialize or justify the ethno-political, but to denote communities that forge their modes of sociability from local connectedness rather than exogenous factors — in other words, mere spatial contiguity does not equal community. Nor does membership in a category.
Enjoyment of institutional and commercial goods like electricity, internet, clean water, well-paved roads, libraries, and stores brimming with products are, in a fashion, extraneous to the crux of social existence: all infrastructure amounts to peripherals tended to as outgrowths of rooted individuals reaped in the harvest of social existence. Even slaves and vassals had families in pre-capitalistic societies. Today, that is seen as superfluous. Wage labourers are motivated to give themselves away to the demands of their job only against the promise of some social and familial harvest. The centripetal movement of life, therefore, is toward the fulfillment of the latter as a condition of the former.
The maintenance of civilization absent the promise of family formation (and the interpenetration of individual and social region) entails a quasi-eusocial conception of society. Eusociality defines as a form of social organization characterized by cooperative brood care, overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. All liberal pluralistic societies have hitherto relied on the smallest kin-cooperative unit, the nuclear family, as the last intermediary structure between the individual and the state. The nuclear family binds local communities and smaller polities into an interest group that functions as a healthy buffer between civil society and the state (I don’t include corporations as part of civil society, but an intermediary structure despite their legal status). As the nuclear family has eroded and the private sphere has shrunk, the buffer between civil society and the state has withered. Atomized individuals tread on a smaller and less stable independent social territory liable to usurpation by either state or corporate actors. As exhibited in nature, eusociality concentrates the reproductive imperative in the few by instrumentalizing the many. However, humans do not exhibit cooperative brood-care except in meagre amounts, and therefore are not conducive to large-scale eusocial organization.
The current ethos does not even acknowledge the reproductive imperative and social life as its outgrowth as the raison d’etre of the entire civilizational scheme (except as vestiges of party platforms aimed at incentivizing former majority constituents like baby boomers). Rather, it views the individual as instrumental for the sustenance of the scheme. This is not something that’s ever explicitly promulgated, but increasingly enacted through public policy, running as an unspoken undercurrent of mainstream political discourse (and perhaps the effect of some covert elite consensus).
The realization of the reproductive imperative for the overwhelming majority of the population forms the motive force — vis motiva — of civilizational participation. As this motive, it forms the condition of possibility of social peaceful coexistence —modus vivendi — that undergirds civilizational processes. If this is true, it follows that a social arrangement that cannot guarantee a personal life to the majority of its contributing members will not remain stable for long. As has been observed and remarked elsewhere, individuals become slaves to the economy instead of the economy serving their interests.
The foregoing brings us to the core critique of liberalism, the reigning ideology. Liberalism defines as a political doctrine that abstracts persons as possessing a sphere of inalienable rights and permits a pluralistic society with differing conceptions of the good, provided that these conceptions of the good do not infringe on these inalienable rights. The philosopher John Rawls calls this the priority of justice over the good. The argument to be fleshed out in greater detail in succeeding articles proposes that liberalism as cursorily defined and its tenets are a luxury. I will argue that abstract, legal rights are necessary but insufficient conditions for human wellbeing. Exponents of liberalism have seldom contextualized liberalism in this way. Their defence of liberalism has rested on viewing liberal principles as providing a rational framework that successfully organizes private and public interests regardless of the shape of civil society. Here, I maintain the inverse. Liberalism is deeply dependent on a pre-existing civil society whose bonds are non-institutional and whose forms of sociability existed and continued to exist in spite of liberal principles. Liberal principles were so successful as the professed ideology of the elites and the modus operandi of the governing structure precisely because they took civil society for granted. However, as we have sought to argue thus far, civil society is not unassailable. It takes care of itself only so long as certain necessary conditions are left intact. These conditions include family formation and forms of sociability that bind larger communities. In many cases family formation only occurs within the space of the latter. To give an example, even multi-ethnic societies like the US and Canada rely on ethnic enclaves forming internal social worlds where members navigate their personal lives. This is all well and good so long as these enclaves provide a social space where the personal and the social intersect, ensuring life within the broader institutional structure (commitment to work, taxation, elections etc) is made bearable. However, individuals that exist outside of these enclaves are completely left to their own devices. The varieties of multi-ethnic liberalism exhibited across North America, chiefly the more assimilationist US and less assimilationist Canada, have zero recourse for accommodating individuals that do not have a ready-made participatory social enclave into a substitute social scheme. Even the idea of assimilation presupposes a larger social body into which you assimilate. However, unless you belong to an ethnic enclave, there is increasingly no larger social world into which one can assimilate. That is to say, outside of these enclaves, there’s no larger internal social world of belonging. Existing perpetually on the outside is profoundly debilitating for humans. I conjecture that this fact is what makes living in North America excruciating for many, and explains the constant discontent that emerges ever more frequently through public violence.
As part and parcel of the capitulation of civil society to institutions and corporate platforms, recent decades have seen formal-professional demands spill into the private sphere, with extra-professional activity and expression become bound and fettered to the professional standard. Where in previous epochs formal bodies maintained an active function in regulating the basic personal fulfillment of individuals, families and communities (however oppressive we see that regulative role through a contemporary lens), in the present one we see the entrenchment of the inverse: personal life is wholly at the mercy of an institutional order that is entirely indifferent to the personal fulfillment of its members, yet also entirely staked in fitting their lives within its clinical, professional codes. This suffocating level of codification of behaviour is anathema to human flourishing.
Furthermore, increasing migration of social interaction online has focused the eye of the panopticon upon the most innocuous of human foibles. It used to be the case that in the privacy of one’s home and away from the public eye, the social barometer would at last relax, and the human being would let its guard down, releasing the negative feelings otherwise suppressed to avoid running afoul coded life. Because evolving public mores have restricted the scope of permissible discourse, which in the past functioned to resolve disagreement into some consensus through negotiation and compromise, dissenting views that would otherwise be resolved publicly are now channelled into covert spaces, festering and transmuting into resentment. Deprived of traditional channels of expression like the public sphere or private ones of friends and family, isolated individuals resort to online anonymity to channel their frustrations. The strategy of the elites in dealing with views that do not fit their promulgated orthodoxy has been to sweep them under the rug by dismissing them as unacceptable and deriding the offenders. Yet this has only served to multiply rather than eliminate the symptoms. The plight of the socially dispossessed cannot be taken up by mainstream discourse partly because the political class is made up of careerists who parrot party dogma rather than individuals genuinely disposed to understanding and solving social problems. Therefore, when those in authority are made aware of online depravity, they resort to condemnation instead of addressing its root causes.
Given the above analysis, the central claim that I will pursue is that when the gemeinschaft becomes hollowed out, the gessellschaft becomes totalizing, oppressive, and ultimately illegitimate. A society where the individual is reduced to an instrument for the sustenance of the gessellschaft and corporate production is not a society at all but a scheme that serves the ultimate interests of a few by exploiting the many. This was Marx’s conclusion about the mode of capitalist production. But the problems today are the inverse of the problems that Marx diagnosed in the latter half of the 19th century. Marx diagnosed the material and bodily exploitation of the proletariat. While this is still to some extent the case, today, by and large, the average individual in the West is materially taken care of and their person legally well-protected. The problem today is far more spiritual, yet no less grave. That you can consume as much as you want and that you have legally encoded rights matters little when life appears to not be worth living. We are, therefore, paradoxically forging a societal scheme that despite material abundance outputs more misery than happiness.
We are, in our time, not only experiencing political decay, as many have noted (Fukuyama, 2014), but the diminution of a variable far more pivotal to the human experience: the erosion of the lifeworld necessary for human wellbeing and flourishing. The lifeworld [Husserl 1936, Heidegger 1927] is constitutively social: it consists of the web of personal relations through which an individual experiences the world and through which larger societal participation is mediated and replenished. Without a social commons and the convivial interpersonal world it facilitates, without the interpenetration of one’s deepest self by some social region to which it belongs, the human being becomes deprived of something far more fundamental than abstract, legal rights: it becomes deprived of its humanity. And so, as our political reality advances toward a future of maximal rights it also paradoxically plunges deeper into a social reality that’s catastrophically inhumane. This inverse proportionality is far from accidental: the more untouchable and pristine the orbit of the person becomes, the greater the yearning for identification.
The sumptuousness of the lifeworld is being depleted, so to speak, leaving behind a hollowed out and shrivelled husk. The philosopher Martin Heidegger famously called animals “world-poor” in contrast to humans, whom he viewed as “world-rich”; not only so, but “worlders” — progenitors of worlds through our collective intentionality. Yet large swaths of humanity, at least as far as North American societies are concerned, are becoming incrementally world-poor as the social world frays and the richness of social being increasingly capitulates to professional-transactional codes. Corporate actors and pernicious ideologies now stand betwixt the sexes, parents and children, friends and communities, attenuating the human bonds upon which civilization hinges. I am reminded of that most intense quote, where Christ quoth to Peter (invoking it chiefly as a literary reference): “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not overcome it.” The word “church” derives from the Greek word ecclesia, which means “to gather together”. The rock is the principle or immovable foundation: agapē — love. The rock has ruptured and weeds have sprouted in the cracks. The gates of Hades stand wide open and unwittingly the masses cross its threshold.
How could this be, you might ask? The paradox is presently more felt than intellectually understood. This catastrophe has made strides in sequestering the individual from meaningful relations and engulfing them in a world, which when honestly beheld, reveals to be utterly inconsequential to their wellbeing yet consumes the depths of their souls: concern with issues and personalities utterly removed from their daily lives that distract them from apprehending and redressing the unfavourable terms of the social scheme in which they are embroiled. Under their noses, the garden withers, yet their sights remain perpetually cast to the mountains. Transfixed, they cannot look away, regaled with slothful, passive pleasures and garish idols neutering their active wills.
In so many words we’ve begun with a surface event, the Jan 6 insurrection as it is called, and its public understanding within the parameters of its proximate political developments, and subsequently delved into the deeper causes and a broader framing of the political situation as the incremental erosion of core modes of sociability that once constituted the backbone of society. Without society, I’ve argued, institutions are instruments of coercion. While compulsion is a core part of civilization as such, the rationale for the scheme rests on its being able to dole out proportional benefits to the social body. In classical contract theory, the exchange of liberties for safety and the administration of justice justifies a minimal level of government. Likewise, the contract between employer and employee sets out the terms in which the latter earns a wage in exchange for their labour. Outside of formal contracts, human sociability is subject to a nested hierarchy of norms which range from relatively explicit to implicit. Some of these norms are broader and may hold for society at large, while other sets of norms exhibit a high degree of in-group specificity. When it comes to the gemeinschaft, norms are continually negotiated in on-going interaction, whereupon the human agent finds a niche of permissibility and expressivity that comes bundled with belonging to a social group. Absent membership in a social group with whom the individual interacts with some regularity and common purpose, the edifice of liberalism and its ratiocinations of justice and social order reveal to be a hull without a kernel. The gemeinschaft constitutes that kernel, which when hollowed out, leaves behind the husk: the gesellschaft. Rawlsian conceptions of justice (the standard view of liberalism today) that defer exclusively to institutions and utility maximization as the foundational metric of instrumental reason cannot account for a society that operates at their prescribed mathematical optima yet continues to devolve inexorably toward total anomie.
Therefore, today the bargains upon which the layers of social contract are premised, from the legitimacy of the state to the workplace, have been thinned down if not outright ruptured. The result is that we live in a society where individuals live up to their part of the bargain but do not receive the bounty of a personal and communal life in return.
In his celebrated A Theory of Justice, the gold standard for modern liberal thought, John Rawls states:
“Whether men [persons] are free is determined by the rights and duties established by the major institutions of society” — John Rawls, p.55, A Theory of Justice
As we see today, this is decisively false. Institutions can only modify freedoms (expand or curtail them) in context of an existing social order wherein the individual is embedded. Without social embeddedness, they are insufficient (albeit necessary) formalisms whose incessant invocation by civil servants and the intelligentsia exposes the widening gulf between intellectual idealizations and the abject reality on the ground.
A corollary of this is that even if all the formal Rawlsian conditions for a just society were to be satisfied, you could still end up with an overall shape of society that is devastatingly inhumane.
The foregoing thesis will be expounded in the three parts:
i. The Hidden Historicity of the World
ii. The Non-Political Underpinnings of Political Order
iii: How the West is Unwittingly Becoming Inhumane
