How Did We Get Into This Mess?
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How Did We Get Into This Mess?
I’m going to be drawing very heavily on an example from Battlestar Galactica. If you didn’t watch the show, or you weren’t a fan … sorry .
I have a great many quibbles with how the latter half of Battlestar Galactica developed, when it became painfully obvious that the producers did not have a plan, but one thing that has always struck me as both entirely plausible and yet mind-bogglingly stupid was the election in which Gaius Baltar was elected President of the Twelve Colonies (or what was left of them), a decision that led straight to the Cylon occupation of New Caprica and the death of a sizeable percentage of the remaining human race. It seems forced, almost as if the producers wanted the story to go in a certain way even though it appears natural, and yet it is not. Like I said, I have many quibbles, but this is something they got right.
Why did Baltar win the election?
As I see it, there are two reasons.
Baltar’s opponent was Laura Roslin, and Roslin was far from a perfect candidate herself. She became President through the death of everyone above her in the line of succession, and in fact did not intend to hold new elections until she was shamed into doing it. She was a religious fanatic who bent the knee to other religious fanatics, she convinced one officer of the fleet to mutiny, sparked off a civil war within the fleet, she plotted to kill the legitimate commanding officer of the fleet, abandoned a number of civilians to the enemy, and even planned to murder an innocent child. She has a terrible habit of giving her word and then going back on it, a sense of her own rightness that makes it hard for her to listen to criticism, and – not least – it was her who appointed Baltar as her Vice President, suggesting she was fine with the prospect of him succeeding her if she died.
Now, you can argue that Roslin was entirely justified in most of these decisions. We, the viewers, might be inclined to side with her even when she is doing something wrong. But not everyone will agree with these decisions, particularly when they don’t have insights us viewers have.
Baltar makes an interesting contrast. He is a man of science, as well as a legitimate war hero, and he has much else to recommend him. He does not, as far as the average citizen knows, have a history of making bad decisions, and even the ones we viewers do know about were not the intentional treason of his original series counterpart. Baltar’s great flaw is being weak willed and feeble, more interested in his own pleasure than that of working for the good of mankind, but that too would not be so apparent to the average citizen of the fleet.
Looked at from the point of view of the average citizen, before the disaster, Baltar is not a bad choice.
But there is a second, far more profound, reason for his election.
The main characters live in relative luxury. The senior officers – and Roslin – have expansive quarters, solely to themselves. Roslin has a corps of reporters and aides who give her administration the sense of being bigger than it is, and who are also presumably living in what passes for luxury. The vast majority of viewpoint characters are well treated, and perhaps – just as important – they have something to do. They may see themselves as deprived, compared to their lives before the flight, but compared to the average citizen they live in luxury.
The average citizen is crammed into a multitude of tiny starships; food is short, water is heavily rationed, the fleet is under de facto martial law and – worse – under constant attack. The lucky ones are working themselves to death trying to keep the fleet going a few weeks; the unlucky ones are trapped in those ships, unable to do anything but pray that one day they will find a place where they can lay down their burdens and rest. They have good reason to be afraid of their president, their military (Admiral Cain was not the only one who committed atrocities against the civilian population), and the relentless enemy who hounds the fleet every day. The fact that the senior crew live in relative luxury, and Roslin feels free to waste resources and personnel on maintaining a West Wing-style administration, would be rubbing salt into the wound. So too would the class and religious divisions within the fleet.
And then they are presented with the opportunity to leave the fleet and settle on a new world.
It seems perfect. New Caprica is difficult to find (and it would not have been found were it not for an unforeseeable disaster), and it seems safe. Why keep looking for a world that might not exist – and by now, it’s possible the fleet knows the commander did not believe originally in Earth – when you could settle New Caprica instead? Like I said, it seems perfect.
The discovery was bad luck for Roslin, but what made it worse was her own failure to realise how this shifted the dynamics of the election. The smart option at this point would be to suggest a compromise between the ‘settle the planet’ and the ‘run away as fast as possible’ options, arranging for a slow and steady settlement that would not put thousands of people at risk if the planet was discovered by the enemy. Instead, Roslin chose a ‘my way or the highway’ approach and discovered, too late, that far too many voters were prepared to choose the highway instead. She basically threw the election to her opponent, a problem compounded by a plot to rig the election in her favour.
Why did she mess up so badly, with such disastrous consequences for the fleet?
The answer is obvious, and it has nothing to do with the producers forcing the outcome. Roslin had lost touch with public opinion, and instead of allowing her actions to be shaped by what the public was prepared to tolerate she was trying to force them to go in a direction they do not want to; worse, she was trying to get them to sacrifice their own concrete interests for a nebulous quest and/or the hypothetical danger of the colony being discovered, attacked and destroyed. To Roslin, who lived in relative luxury, this was not a great hardship; to everyone else, it most definitely was.
It seems impossible, in hindsight, that anyone could vote for Baltar. But if you had been on that fleet, in those conditions, you would properly have voted for Baltar too. And so would I.
***
And now we shall move from TV shows to modern real-life politics.
The European elections saw a major rise in support for right-wing parties. This has not yet produced any decisive shift in the balance of power – the European Union is very bad at listening to public opinion, and is carefully designed to limit the influence of public opinion – but that has not stopped a vast number of commenters screaming about the rise of the far right. There have been endless comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini, grim predictions about the future of Europe if the far right gets into power, and a great deal of breast-beating about how people could be so stupid to vote for those fools. Some have even questioned the value of democracy at all, running arguments that essentially boil down to “we have to destroy democracy in order to save it:” they have attacked the founding principle of democracy, free speech, on the assumption that doing so will save the world, and undermined social trust to point it can no longer be said to exist.
The core problem is that the European elites have fallen into very bad habits. They do not attempt to answer the arguments put forward by their enemies; instead, they attack their enemies personally, screaming insults and accusations of fascism, and do everything in their power to lock them out of politics and silence their voices. They certainly make no attempt to adjust their policies in response to the rise of right-wing parties, not even trying to throw increasingly disillusioned voters a bone. From the point of view of someone living in an ivory tower, in safety, their policies make sense; from the point of view of someone who does not have that safety, their policies are utterly disastrous. It is the fundamental problem facing elites that are increasingly choosing to put appearance over reality.
And the only reason they can get away with that is because reality does not affect them. Yet.
Their actions have had four entirely predictable consequences. First, by locking anyone rightwards of centre-left out of power as much as possible, they have spared the right-wing any share of the blame for the economic and social disasters sweeping over Europe. (Ironically, this is one of the few moments where the Hitler comparison actually works.) Second, by proving they have lost their grip on reality, they make the right wing look sane and reasonable by comparison. Third, by smearing sane and reasonable policies as ‘fascist,’ to the point the word has lost all meaning (along with a vast number of others) they have provided political cover for people who are genuinely fascist. And fourth, by attacking free speech, slandering their enemies and undermining social trust, they have ensured that any genuine warnings about the dangers of the far right will go unheard.
And they have lost touch so completely that they are unable to realise that they are their own worst enemies.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. But those who effortlessly use the Hitler comparison have not learnt any of the lessons of Hitler’s rise to power and the subsequent destruction of democracy and the war that left Germany and much of Europe in ruins. Hitler rose to power, at least in part, because Weimar Germany was caught in a global economic storm it could neither avoid nor control. It was very much a victim of events outside its own borders, although the failure to deal with Hitler while they had the chance certainly played a major role in their own collapse. Modern day Europe, by comparison, enjoyed – or used to – a considerable degree of control over its own fate. It was possible that a sane and rational policy could have led to a European Union that worked, but that would have required leaders who were practical men and a genuine commitment to democracy and accountability. Instead, we have an elitist organisation with an immense democratic deficit and a population that increasingly feels it no longer has any say in its own future. And that population is growing desperate.
It is a sad truth that desperate men make poor decisions. Desperation can drive people frantic, push them to take ‘all or nothing’ choices that would be, from a more dispassionate point of view, excessive, immoral, or both. The refusal to address entirely legitimate concerns fuels desperation, and the willingness to embrace extreme solutions …
Because if everything is fascist, nothing is …
… And if you are drowning, you don’t stop to check who is offering you a hand before taking it.
***
And now the United States has a far worse problem.
There is no denying the simple fact that Joe Biden performed very badly in the recent debate. It made a mockery of all suggestions that Biden’s near-senility was exaggerated by his political enemies, and calls into question his ability to survive another four years in the most stressful occupation in the world. All he had to do was look more sane and reasonable than Donald Trump, not a particularly high bar to clear, and he couldn’t even do that. For Republicans, the debate was proof that Biden simply is not up the job; for Democrats, the debate calls the common sense of the party leadership in the question, as well as the truthfulness.
But the Democrats have backed themselves into a corner. And how are they going to get themselves out of this mess?
If they convince Biden not to run in the coming election, who will be his successor? Kamala Harris is even less popular than Biden himself, and she lacks any real support within the Democratic Party. Her selection as VP may have come from cold political calculation rather than any consideration of the long-term good of both the party and the country itself. Running Kamala would be even more chancy than running Hillary, but asking her to stand aside to would raise the spectre of accusations of racism, of the suggestion that the party elites are quite happy to push aside a black woman to make room for a white man. They would have to grasp the nettle of accepting her as a presumptive candidate or taking the political heat for pushing her out, and I am not sure which one they would consider to be the best of a pair of bad choices.
Perhaps the best choice would be to try to arrange a new nomination process, and insist that Kamala seek the votes of the party members like everyone else. But even that would not be likely to go down very well.
But the even bigger problem is that the party elites have lost touch with the people. They are so consumed with hatred for Donald Trump that they have actually become their own worst enemies, and instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to win votes by pushing sensible policies they have inflicted a great deal of damage – and convinced many of their own voters that they are insane – and somehow made Donald Trump look the better choice.
As the movie tagline goes,” whoever wins, we lose.”
