http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/12/04/american-mobacracy/
By: Abe Greenwald. Editor Commentary Daily
“The future belongs to crowds,” wrote Don DeLillo in his 1991 novel Mao II. Boy, was he right. Today it’s protests in response to a baffling grand jury decision, but the phenomenon has been building for years. Tea Party rallies, the Rally for Sanity, Occupy Wall Street, minimum-wage protests, hoodie rallies, anti-Israel protests, climate rallies, Ferguson “die-ins,” World AIDS Day, World This Day, World That Day. The mass-grievance spectacle has come to saturate our culture and politics, and shape our national life.
In between demonstrations mob-rule holds firm by other means. Foremost online. The armchair lynch mobs of social media drive news cycles and end careers. A vigorous digital witch-hunt can wreck a life. In China, online vigilantism by an otherwise enfeebled citizenry goes by the term “human-flesh searches.” We’re not they’re yet, but we’re close.
Television too is coming under the sway of mobacracy. During the first round of Ferguson protests, news reporters joined the ranks of the enraged so they too could rail against police. On hipper talk shows, the political applause line has replaced the joke as the fundamental unit of communication. The new definition of comedian is a demagogue who gets a pass on vulgarity and inaccuracy. His goal is no longer to leave them in stitches; it’s to affirm the pooled self-righteousness of the audience with a zinger aimed at a common enemy. The Daily Show, Real Time, Last Week Tonight—it’s the news with cheering.
Why is this happening? It’s not because worsening conditions are driving people to justified rage. Life in today’s lowest American income bracket is no picnic, but all relevant data show it’s a material paradise compared to the poverty of less turbulent eras. Prejudice exists, naturally, but on a dramatically smaller scale than at any point in our history. And (if we must), global temperatures, as even NASA now acknowledges, haven’t changed significantly for 15 years.
Perhaps, then, the righteous mob satisfies a new non-material crisis in American life—namely, the need for meaning and connection. People are now less likely to affiliate with larger entities and institutions that once gave their lives shape and value: family, community, church, nation. Sharp declines in religious belief, marriage, and childbearing are stripping us of enduring notions of virtue and purpose and we’re striving to replace them.
Some quick facts: According to Pew, the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has doubled since 1990 alone. Another Pew poll tells us: “After decades of declining marriage rates and changes in family structure, the share of American adults who have never been married is at an historic high.” In 1960, only 9 percent of Americans over 25 hadn’t ever married. In 2012, the number was 20 percent. And in 2013, a federal government study concluded that the U.S. birthrate had fallen to a record low of 1.86 births per woman.
Here are the questions we face as a result: For whom or what do we sacrifice? What constitutes community? And how, ultimately, do we find transcendence? The old institutions furnished answers. We sacrificed for faith and family because that’s what our shared values dictated. Out of those shared values we found community. And through connections to God and each other, we transcended ourselves.
The galvanized mob picks up the slack both for lost meaning and lost human contact. Activism was once reserved for a small segment of the mostly young and self-righteous. Today, it’s just another dimension of cosmopolitan life. You subscribe to a cause—be it anti-fracking or organic food—and stick with it. As it occupies the space of religion, you tend to preach your cause hypocritically. But your cause asks so little of you (perhaps to post a meme on your Facebook profile), that you’re not really invested. It doesn’t ultimately satisfy the need for transcendence because you sacrificed so little.
The weak in conviction seek strength in numbers. They connect online and meet up to block a bridge or lie down in a train station. As community, this ultimately fails too. Participants don’t share values; they share a need for values. When it comes down to it, they’re no more sincere about one cause than they are about another.
Without strength (which comes from sacrifice), without ideas (which come from engaging tradition, not running from it), all that’s left is emotion. So emotion becomes the content of our politics. The irony of the recent anti-police outrage is that it’s arisen from a culture of constant policing: the identity police, the Islamophobia police, the language police, the food police, the bully police, the trigger-warning squads—they’re all out to catch and punish offenders. No grand jury convened.
These mob events look like action, but they ensure stasis. Nothing fruitful comes from channeling religious and family needs into politics. It’s worth recalling that the Russian word Bolshevik literally meant one of the majority.
Sent from my yacht
