The Long Crisis
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes (3049 words)
How do you know when you are in a crisis?
Some moments speak for themselves: September 11, 2001. The 2008 financial crash. Our current pandemic. But other moments are more subtle: midterm elections. Rising anti-constitutional sentiment. An incapable government.
How do you know when you are not just in a crisis, but the crisis? A period so long, lurching from moment to moment, that it transcends a single event and becomes the event itself. In other words, the Long Crisis.
More than 1700 years ago the Roman Empire found itself in a similar position. On March 19, 235 A.D Emperor Severus Alexander was assassinated. What followed was a nearly-50 year period of political unrest and social change that almost destroyed the Empire. The crisis period ended in 284 A.D. with the ascension of Diocletian and the reforms he initiated that stabilized the empire.
The assassination of Severus Alexander touched off the crisis in the way that Franz Ferdinand’s assassination — small though it was — touched off World War I. In Alexanders’ case, his continued appeasement of intrusive Germanic tribes, prompted in large part by his mother, was poorly received by his own troops. Another conflict with the Persians was similarly panned. After several blown opportunities to confront the Germans in a way that would have solidified the military’s loyalty, Alexander was assassinated by his soldiers and the general Maximinus Thrax was elevated as emperor.
Unbeknownst to the Romans at the time, the death of Alexander Severus was the spark that lit the Crisis of the Third Century. Maximinus reigned for only three years, as opposed to Alexander’s 13, and was also assassinated by the legions. The pattern that formed would last for the next 50 years: the legions would elevate an emperor from their ranks; when that emperor lost their favor, he was assassinated, and so on. Elevation begat usurpations; usurpations begat assassinations, and instability became the norm. It was military anarchy.
The Roman Empire in 271 A.D. Map via Wikipedia (historicair)
While the legions fought among themselves to advance their preferred candidates to the imperial throne, the outposts of the empire began to break away. What the Romans had provided in security and economic prosperity began to deteriorate with the breakdown of the imperial order. The Gallic Empire in the west acted under the local governor, Postumus, to secure its borders and deter the threat of invasion, which it largely accomplished for 14 years until it was reabsorbed into the Empire by Aurelian in 274. In the east, the Palmyrene Empire acted similarly: it was aligned with Rome, but struck out on its own to pick up the slack the Romans were leaving behind.
For 50 years, the Empire sagged under its own weight and almost reached the point of no return. If not for strong leadership at the right time the Roman Empire as we understand it could have ended in 235.
By the end of the crisis the Roman state had been significantly transformed. The Roman economy was radically altered. Christianity was positioned to supplant paganism. The Eastern and Western halves of the Empire set course on their permanent bifurcation. And the principate — the way of governance established by Augustus at the end of the Republican period two and a half centuries earlier — gave way to the dominate. On the outside, the Empire that emerged from the crisis looked in continuity with the Empire before it. But on the inside, everything was different.
The Romans living between 235 and 284 might not have felt that theirs was a world on the brink; in a similar way, Americans alive today might not realize they are in the middle of a prolonged crisis period that could upend their form of government, economy, and society when the period eventually passes.
The Crisis of the Third Century is evident to us now, between the breakdown of the Roman empire, economic hardship, and a frayed social order. But in this century, how we define “crisis” is important in recognizing that the events of the last twenty-odd years are not independent from each other, are intimately linked, and have worked together to create the moment in which we find ourselves.
A “crisis event” can be defined as 1) unexpected, 2) of manmade or natural cause, 3) that negatively impacts every level of society, and 4) has no easy solution.
Under that definition, many of the events of the past two decades are crisis events. But what elevates those individual occurrences into the Long Crisis? Let’s stipulate a few items:
Events will largely remain the same. Hurricanes and wildfires have always and will always occur. Economic boom and bust cycles will continue to happen. Pandemics, though rare, will repeat. The climate will fluctuate. Democracies will take populist turns. The events encountered in the 21st Century have been encountered in the past. In that sense, nothing is new under the sun.
The societal response to events — proaction, reaction, and indifference — can vary widely.
How events are responded to can make or break institutions and governments.
The long term confluence of events and inadequate institutional reactions creates the conditions for the Long Crisis.
If there was a singular moment where these trends began, it would be in 2001, specifically in the fallout of September 11 of that year. The federal government’s response to those attacks, by starting two “Forever Wars” (one based on questionable intelligence) and occupying the region with no exit strategy, polarized the conflict and underscored federal fecklessness. It also exposed the issues with neoconservatism and led, however windingly, to Donald Trump, strained alliances, and “America First.” The Bush administration’s domestic defeats, such as Social Security and immigration reform, combined with the Great Recession, pushed the president out of office with a 34 percent approval rating — lower even than Donald Trump on the eve of his defeat.
Consider another set of events: increasingly volatile “snapback” elections from 2000 to the present. “Snapback” elections are not landslides, but they are massive fluctuations in Congressional representation and the presidency. In 2000, Republicans (narrowly) won the presidency, held the House, and lost the Senate. In the 2002 midterms, Republicans held the House and retook the Senate. In 2004, George W. Bush convincingly won reelection and Republicans held Congress. In the 2006 midterms, Republicans lost Congress outright, and in 2008, Democrats solidified their hold on the legislative branch and picked up the White House.
The 2010 midterms were more of a departure point into a new era. In those elections, Republicans gained 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. In the 2014 midterms, they took the Senate and gained 13 more House seats. In 2016, Donald Trump weakly won the presidency and Republicans held Congress, only to lose 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms.
The 2020 election has only been more odd. Expected to achieve unified government control, the Democratic Party almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The party lost seats in the House, will most likely remain the minority party in the Senate, and won the presidency by the same electoral vote margin Donald Trump won by in 2016.
Since 2010, victories have been both larger and smaller, more total and yet more weird. Elections, in other words, have become more polarized.
An important item to note is that the presidency has been relatively “stable” in the two decades since the 2000 election, in the sense that there have only been three presidents and two of them, at least, have served two terms. Compared to Congressional turnover, the stability of the presidency looks solid. However, there has never been a post-Civil War period of American history when the presidency has flipped from one party to the next so frequently as it has since 2000 — four times with Joe Biden’s recent victory.
Indeed, between Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, a span of 85 years, presidents from the same party only served nonconsecutively in two instances: Grover Cleveland’s two terms from 1884-1888 and 1892-1896 and Woodrow Wilson’s two terms from 1913-1921. (Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s immediate successor, was on the National Union ticket in 1864 and served his second term as a Democrat).
Between Harry Truman and George W. Bush, the parties again settled into a more stable dynamic with few exceptions: eight years of Eisenhower were followed by eight of Kennedy/Johnson, followed by eight of Nixon/Ford, followed by four of Carter, followed by 12 of Reagan/Bush, followed by eight of Clinton. Of course there was turmoil in this stretch (Watergate, Vietnam, an assassination, the Cold War), but compared to the snapback nature of presidential elections since 2000, the continuity is notable.
George W. Bush taking the oath of office in 2001. (AP Photo/Doug Mills)
But since 2001, when Clinton transferred power to Bush, there have been three transfers of power with a fourth on its way. Only one other time in American history have more transfers of power between opposing parties occurred in a 20 year period: from 1841 to 1861, power was exchanged between Democrats, Whigs, and Republicans; two presidents died in office, and they or their successors served for one term six consecutive times. When Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861 the Civil War was already underway.
Contrary to what some pundits claim today, the snapback nature of recent elections is not necessarily indicative of a new Civil War. But it is indicative of larger issues, of a government that has lost legitimacy with its constituents, of sclerotic institutions, and of crisis.
Consider another event: the coronavirus pandemic, and how disastrous the federal government’s response to it has been. Perhaps it was unavoidable that the United States would suffer from the worst pandemic in a century, and that no amount of scientific preparedness or political acumen could have staved off the inevitable. There is probably some truth to this assessment, because despite the unique ineptitude of American leaders in this moment, the European virus experience that was initially divergent from ours has by now, seven months into the pandemic, coincided more and more with the initial American experience, despite stronger and more decisive European leadership.
But more probably, the American government’s blunders underpin the argument for the Long Crisis: that caught in cyclical crisis events, all of which are intertwined with each other, the government could have done very little to make the pandemic better, and in fact has done a lot to make it worse. What gives this moment the hallmarks of a unique crisis is not the nature of the crisis itself (pandemics have happened and will continue to happen), but the nature of the government’s response: inadequacy, indifference, obstruction, and mind-numbing willful ignorance.
Crisis after crisis has left the federal government stumbling without a chance to catch its breath. The cumulative effect over time is to delegitimize the government as an effective force to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty,” as the Constitution says. Compounding the government’s self-inflicted wounds is a direct challenge to the constitutional order that, while still in its infancy, is a philosophy incompatible with the established order.
Prolonged crises, damaged legitimacy, and stalemate are what elevate individual events into the event: the Long Crisis.
At its core, what the United States is currently experiencing, and what the Roman state experienced 1700 years ago, is a crisis of institutional legitimacy. For the Romans, that meant a blown-apart empire and more emperors in less time than ever before. For the United States, that means a delegitimized federal government and a rival philosophy, with real buy-in, to the established constitutional order.
As noted above, the cyclical nature of events has eroded trust in the government and hurt its legitimacy with the public, perhaps fueling the snapback elections in an effort to find stability. But the legitimacy crisis also reflects the rise of a counter-constitutional framework that is gaining legitimacy among the ruling class and elites.
Critical Theory and its spinoffs, most prominently Critical Race Theory (CRT), have floated around academia for several decades and have gradually seeped into society at large. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020, in the midst of one crisis (the pandemic) and as the result of another (the police killing of George Floyd and subsequent unrest), that CRT went mainstream, invading corporate HR departments, mainstream and social media, and even training courses for federal employees.
A Chicago police car burns during a riot in May, 2020. (Chicago Sun-Times)
In a recent article for Tablet, Bari Weiss describes the weird philosophical amalgam that currently defines Critical Theory and its adherents:
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.
Allow me to suggest a name for this movement: recombinantism, which accurately describes the conjoining of its constituent parts to create a new ideology. These “parts” are from the left, largely anti-liberal (in the classical sense), and typically align against constitutional principles despite using the constitutional system to find legitimacy. The current constitutional order is still largely stable, but as Weiss points out, a feeling seems to be percolating that recombinantism will supplant constitutionalism as society’s dominant ideology.
Recombinantism is threatening because of its reliance on critical theories at the expense of constitutional principles. Because critical theories elevate personal experiences and disregard objectivity, these theories operate outside the current objectivity-based framework. For example, the freedom of speech is often targeted by recombinantism as “harmful,” in a literal, physical sense, because it permits the negation of individual experiences, something which among more extreme elements can be akin to slavery or colonialism (see: Yale removing the word “master” from residential colleges because of its racial and historical connotations). This emphasis on experience stems from critical theory’s opposition to established, inherited norms, which are viewed as systems of oppression.
The constitutional order dispenses with that mindset entirely by providing societal guardrails and no more. In the constitutional system, experience is what you make it.
Recombinantism is succeeding because of the vacuum liberalism has created between its values and how those values are enacted. To take a few examples: the anti-racism dichotomy (e.g., “everything is either racist or anti-racist”) is largely a response to the perceived failures, or shortcomings, of colorblind policies. The neo-Marxist strain is a response to the shortcomings of globalist capitalism, from free trade agreements, to the experience of the 2008 financial crisis, to coronavirus relief gridlock. The “therapeutic mentality” — what I take to mean as cancel culture — is largely a mechanism to enforce dogmatic orthodoxy within the movement.
In Jonah Goldberg’s 2018 book Suicide of the West, he deep dives into Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy for articulating the issues inherent in the capitalist structure that could lead to the system’s undoing. Scumpeter’s analysis also goes a long way towards explaining the rise of recombinantism. Goldberg’s distillation of Schumpeter is worth quoting in detail:
First, capitalism is relentlessly and unsentimentally rational and efficient. The free market tends to wipe away tradition and ritual in the name of profit....
The second component of Schumpeter’s theory is that capitalism’s relentless assault on tradition and custom creates a market opportunity for intellectuals, lawyers, writers, artists, bureaucrats and other professionals who work with ideas to undermine and ridicule the existing system....
The third component of Schumpeter’s theory is that, as capitalism creates more and more mass affluence, it creates more and more intellectuals, until they actually become a ‘new class’... As capitalism makes mass education possible, it creates a mass audience, a whole market for what the intellectuals are selling. And what the intellectuals are selling is resentment of the way things are. This creates a much broader climate of hostility to the social order itself.
Recombinatism is these trends manifested. What makes it unique is that it has successfully melded together previously disparate leftwing elements into a consensus movement, one that is directly opposed to the current order.
How does the Long Crisis end?
Without pretending to know with certainty where the current moment will lead, there exists a range of possibilities from more likely to less likely to occur. On the less likely end of the spectrum there is the thought that the United States could get a “divorce” or “disintegrate” (to euphemize secession), an idea that David French recently suggested in his book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How To Restore Our Nation. An American “divorce” would see the country split at the seams of its geographic divisions and its ideological enclaves.
On the other end of the spectrum, there is an undercurrent of expectation that the Biden presidency can usher in a new age of bipartisan cooperation, a lowering of the temperature, competent governance, and that Biden can be the restitutor orbis, at least in the political sense. This seems somewhat plausible but is also rife with the possibility that the new administration could quickly buckle in the face of Congressional obstruction, a foreign crisis, or even continued post-presidential harassment from Donald Trump. Biden’s long term success largely rests on him threading a polarized needle.
Yet another possibility is that the Long Crisis could get much worse before it gets better: for instance, if the United States gets embroiled in a Great Power War with China during Biden’s presidency, which perhaps he does not finish and from which his successor loses reelection, leading to yet another transfer of power during the biggest conflict since World War II. The Long Crisis could get worse on the homefront too: there is no law of nature against back-to-back pandemics, or major earthquakes, or agricultural failure. Similarly, partisan fighting could intensify, even if a new civil war never gets “hot.”
The most optimistic, sustainable way past the Long Crisis is by replacing inoperable norms with new ones on a grand scale. This could take the form of an Article V Constitutional Convention, where amendments can be proposed but not ratified. Or perhaps the Supreme Court, operating with a new balance of power, will push past political stalemates and create new cultural settlements. Congress can also help by being more responsive to its constituents, such as by increasing the size of the House of Representatives. Either way this scenario plays out, old norms must be removed and new norms must be created.
No matter how the Long Crisis is ultimately resolved, the United States that emerges from it will not be the same one that went in.