Weimar and QAnon: Why we So Far Remain Stable
By: Cicero Madison
Tags: Democracy In America, Covid 19 Crisis, Democracy, Inequality

The most compelling and under-discussed fact that explains the strength of the American Republic is the relative stability of the US Economy.

We tend to live in a pleasantly deluded state that American exceptionalism protects us from the sort of mass politico-religious fervor that grabbed France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1932. Many authors point to our constitutional structures well described in The Federalist Papers. Others focus more on our culture of civic participation, well described by De Tocqueville.

The brilliant structures established in the Constitution, and the Tocquevellian cultural norms that support democracy stand as two key pillars in the triad that keep our Republican Temple aloft. But the Temple would fall but for the third pillar: economic stability; the lack of mass hunger, homelessness and helplessness among the populace.

We have a pleasant relationship to the State, which we mostly ignore, so long as our lives can proceed. But this feeling changes quickly when we encounter the power of state action. The Left focuses on police interactions with African Americans and immigrants. The Right focuses historically on the power to tax, and currently on the public health social distancing mandates.

Resistance to the authority of the state is a natural feeling that arises whenever the state acts to impair one’s life. The sting of a tax bill fuels revolutionary thoughts when the County sheriff evicts you from your farm.

Seditious fervor existed in Spring 2020 in the parts of the country where social distancing means hunger. Most readers of Medium can pay the wireless bill along with the rent or mortgage and food ten months into the pandemic. Since we live in a country in which we experience life in silos, fellow Medium readers, our daily sense of pandemic-abnormal focuses on lonelinesss and alienation. But the institutions that pay us continue to do so. So the pandemic means sadness, but it does NOT mean hunger and fear.

Not so in rural Michigan, where men plotted to kidnap Governor Whitmer. There, many towns have lost a large portion of their economy. These are communities in which families have virtually no credit available and few savings because they function to a great degree on cash. One person fixes hot water heaters and landscapes. Another serves coffee and eggs in the diner. Some people work in the local factory, and others do small construction jobs. Some folks do get Social Security disability or retirement checks, but that money gets spread through the community in small cash exchanges. In the Spring of 2020, those exchanges stopped in rural Michigan and many other rural areas as a result of Government shutdown orders. With a closing of restaurants, bars and stores, and the prohibition of in-person manual labor, the factories closed, and the landscaping stopped. There was no large savings account, or home equity line of credit or room on the credit card to buy food.

For the people in such a desperate situation, the shutdowns were the immediate threat, not covid. And for most of these folks, their friends and neighbors were largely suffering financially. It felt to some as though the elected Government was the threat to life and property.

Moreover, remember our silos — you likely don’t know people facing such fear. Your employer, a hospital or school district or university or advertising agency or software firm probably kept paying salaries to you and your friends and neighbors. And because you are educated, you are more likely to be politically active.

So governors in states with large cities heard from epidemiologists but also from economists and corporate leaders and made public health choices that they believed would work for the state as a whole. But they did not hear in the Spring the voices of those in the rural cash economy.

Yet Governor Whtimer remained quite popular in the state as whole because her policies worked for most people in more populated areas. Conversely, rural state governors such as in Iowa and South Dakota engaged in abysmal public health practices precisely because they heard the rural voices’ too much. In the summer and autumn, the social distancing policies in Michigan and other states have since been tweaked such that much work can continue even if the restaurant and bar industries have been decimated. And the temporary seditious fervor has quieted.

Now imagine that across America, suburban life would experience the fear, helplessness and hunger that rural America had in Spring 2020, what do you think public support for a democratically elected government would be? How quickly would your fellow Americans support a candidate who promised you food to feed your child even at the cost of some Democratic norms?

Economic inequality remains a minor threat to the stability of the Republic precisely because elected political officials tend not to react to a minority of poor citizens. But Congress does react to the emergency needs of the majority.

In normal politics, Congress weighs competing voices from different regions. Climate change activists do not listen to the voices of those in communities where polluting industries provide food for their children, and the congresspeople from such polluting communities tend not to listen to the voices of scientists. Normal politics is frustrating, but America works as the Framers envisioned.

And we have reason to be hopeful that our system will remain stable. We have seen during the New Deal of the 1930s and the bailouts of 2008 that normal politics gets Congress to provide exceptions to the typical rules of regulated capitalism when the basic economic stability of a large share of the population is at stake.

But the best thing we can do for the stability of the Republic is to ensure that governmental policy does not ignore those who suffer and feel desperate and under attack from their own Government.