As a follow-up to my previous post about the crisis in institutions, I want to give a shout out to James Fallows, who with his wife Deborah, has been arguing for the past few years that while the large-scale train wreck that is US national politics is obvious to everyone, few people realize that at the local level people are actually getting work done. In this piece, he hangs this idea on something of a stretch, that the Roman Empire's collapse is a good model for our own age, with the overarching imperial structure disappearing but at the regional level lots of structure remaining. Now I actually have been doing a fair amount of reading in this area, and I can say that this is an interesting idea, but something of a stretch, not least because it doesn't speak to the one large feature of the fifth and sixth centuries AD that is not currently replicated in the US context, namely, the barbarian invasions. Oh, and also the Justinianic plague of the mid-sixth century, which burned through the Latin west just as much as it did the Byzantine east. Among other things.
But really, who's counting? The conceit of a collapse at the top level of governance not leading to an utter collapse at lower levels is interesting. Fallows's basic idea seems to me insightful--that, beneath our large-scale national tantrum, there are resources of civic capital that we may be able to build upon in coming decades. Wondrously, that local civic capital is not mediated to anyone by social media--which seems to be one of the most toxic forces in our public life today. Also, that civic capital is mostly face to face, and people at the personal level seem to be able to get along.
All this begs the question of, well if we can all get along on the ground, why is our national life so depressing? I think some of this has to do with contingencies--for instance, the basic demographics of America haven't changed much from Obama to Trump, but the Obama to Trump change has changed a lot, and that was not a foreordained change. There's nothing inevitable about our horror, no matter how deeply depressing it is; intensity and inevitability are not, in medieval philosophical terms, convertible transcendentals--that is, they do not vary directly or inversely. We sometimes forget that.
But beyond the contingencies, my theory of the case remains that we're undergoing a massive demographic change, and that this change is predictably being resisted by those who feel threatened by it. That is not just sound and fury, but it may well end up signifying a lot less than we currently seem to think it does. If that turns out to be the case, Fallows's prediction may be right. Whether or not "America" falls like Rome seems to have done.