Earlier this month, Unherd contributing editor Mary Harrington responded to my criticism of her apparent willingness to consider “Caesarism” — that is, strongman, authoritarian rule — as a solution for the problems that plague the modern world. Harrington begins by describing the odious, anti-republican, and demagogic content and optics of President Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, in which the allegedly comity-seeking politician considerably escalated the partisan warfare against his political opponents. “The remainder of the speech re-invoked American democracy while suggesting that Biden’s political opponents were a threat not to his presidency but to all of that 200-year-old project,” she writes. “Both sides claimed the speech as evidence that the other side is the real threat to American democracy.”
All good so far. But she then continues, lumping me in with Biden’s hysteria:
Or perhaps the real threat is me? This, at least, is the implication of a recent article in US conservative journal National Review, which noted that I’ve suggested more than once lately that I think Caesarism may be the least worst option for future Western politics, and accused me of shilling for authoritarianism.
My case against Harrington is wholly distinct from Biden’s “case” against his political adversaries. She is, after all, up to something else. She does not believe herself to be a partisan actor of either stripe. Rather, she believes that “liberal democracy is probably doomed,” but not due to the efforts “of either Left [or] Right, so much as deep structural reasons.”
What are those structural reasons? Harrington believes that the nature of modern technology has destroyed the possibility of democratic citizenship. Citing the work of Adam Garfinkle, she argues that the rise of literacy and the virtues attendant to it created and sustained the American regime. Ergo, could not the rise of attention-destroying stimuli and the concomitant erosion of attention spans destroy that regime, as we have come to know it? Garfinkle wonders if, with the decline in abstract thinking, “is it possible that an emotionally more volatile post-deep-literate society may at a certain tipping point regress to accommodate, and even to prefer, less-refined and -earned forms of governance?” Harrington cites Garfinkle’s conclusion that a politics in which this is true would come to be dominated by “a less abstract, re-personalized form of social and political authority concentrated in a ‘great’ authoritarian leader.”
Here’s one thing Harrington is right about: Technology is not some universal panacea for all social problems. It creates many as well. Nor is it always inherently liberating; fascists found ways to use the radio, and the Chinese Communist Party is creating a mightily oppressive digital-surveillance state. Even outside such regimes, technology can have downsides. (It can even be a pathway to sin!) Neil Postman warned of such things in his 1985 anti-television jeremiad Amusing Ourselves to Death. His lament about how television was moving us away from a “typographic age” that sustained more rigorous public thought is downright quaint now. One can even long for merely the ills described in the introduction to the 2005 edition, written by Postman’s son, Andrew, which notes that 1985 had “yet to be infiltrated by the Internet, cell phones, PDAs, cable channels, by the hundreds, DVDs, call-waiting, caller ID, blogs, flat-screens, HDTV, and iPods.”
Figuring out how to respond to the digital age is one of the main challenges our politics faces in the coming decades. Just as Whittaker Chambers warned that “a conservatism that cannot face the facts of the machine and mass production, and its consequences in government and politics, is foredoomed to futility and petulance,” a conservatism that cannot face the facts of the computer and digital life will have little to offer politics.
Where I differ from Harrington is in the way she casts Caesarism as a kind of acceptable inevitability. She rightly notes that authoritarianism is a growing attribute of modern politics, and that in some respects the young are worse on this score than the old, thus increasing the likelihood of further deviation from the habits of self-government. This is indeed something to worry about. But it always is. Transmission of these habits is a perennial focus — and difficulty — of such systems, whatever the circumstances of a given polity. And just as perennial are arguments that some new crisis or set of conditions has made such systems obsolete. Arguments of this nature are often presented with a patina of objectivity.
Or, better yet, in Harrington’s case, with a bit of wistful remorse. So, although Harrington claims it is her “sincere wish that our democratic ships will find a way to right themselves,” she nonetheless fears that they won’t, and that no amount of wishing on her part can make it so. “Accusing me of trying to conjure this shift into existence is like accusing someone who points out an oncoming tsunami of making it up because they really love swimming,” she says. And if “we just aren’t making the kind of people who founded” our democratic system, “the system will become something new.” Thus to my case that we should reject Caesar, she merely retorts, pace Trotsky, “you may not be interested in Caesarism, but Caesarism will be interested in you.”
What this ignores is that Caesar is always interested in us. The Caesarian temptation is not new; it is the default of human affairs. Which is why I find it so curious that ostensibly forward-thinking minds, such as Harrington and Curtis Yarvin (whose specter looms large over Harrington’s latest piece though he goes unnamed in it), see for modern political problems this ancient solution. Alternatives, such as adapting to new realities through our existing institutions, are considered futile.
Harrington presents her argument about Caesarism as descriptive, not prescriptive. “If I’m right,” she prefaces relevant observations in multiple pieces, a kind of hedging that acts to enhance her ostensible credibility as an impartial observer. But those truly interested in sustaining self-government know that its survival has always depended on agency and volition. The flipside of this is that looking at such a system as though its failure is inevitable can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy, even — or perhaps especially — when such analyses are heavy on deterministic analyses of material conditions. By providing one of her own, Mary Harrington is not a threat to democracy. But, if I’m right, she displays an unseemly insouciance about the possibility of its demise.