The Exception Is the Rule and the World is Aflame
A crisis dispatch
Tick, tock.
The clock keeps ticking. Deeper and deeper into this historical moment, whose climax grows nearer by the day. An economic and geopolitical crisis of enormous proportions gathers strength like a storm moving toward landfall — its destructive potential still not fully visible to those who have not yet looked at the horizon.
We are living in the most dangerous and consequential moment of any living human being’s lifetime.
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A fascist government in the United States is trying to consolidate its power. It is failing. But it is trying. And what is most troubling — more troubling, in some ways, than the attempt itself — is that the bulk of politicians in Congress, judges in the judiciary, and elite members of society are still largely conducting themselves as though this is a mostly normal political situation. As though the hydrostatic swings of ordinary politics can be counted on to return us to equilibrium. As though the center, once lost, finds itself again.
The center has not held. We are barreling into the flames.
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There remain, in the political machinery of the West and the commentariat that narrates its happenings to the public, a remarkable number of greatly unserious people. People who cannot seem to focus on the thing that is most important.
The executive branch of the United States government has engaged in an unconstitutional coup. This is not a metaphor. It is not hyperbole. It is a description of observable events.
Ignored court orders. A massive war prosecuted in the Middle East, unauthorized and unfunded by the Congress. Thousands of masked men in the streets operating without any regard to the restrictions on government power enshrined in the Bill of Rights. These are not policy disagreements. These are not the ordinary friction of separated powers. They are the evidence.
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Into this image of a failing constitutional order, a remarkable class of legal commentators has produced a remarkable body of work. Hand-wringing over arcane separation-of-powers concerns. Sophisticated and nuanced legal interpretations about the president’s area of plenary powers — powers for which, we are told, no legal review or public visibility may be permitted. Many of these people will insist, with great sincerity, that they are opposed to Trump. They will then quietly insist that the courts stopping him would be dangerous — that it would set dangerous precedents, disturb the delicate architecture of constitutional balance, risk something worse.
None of these people are morally serious actors.
Their concern for abstract problems — about a hypothetical president in a hypothetical existential situation being unable to act, if not for wide, unreviewable plenary authority — is the politics of exception. And I want to be very clear about what the politics of exception is, because there has been enough confusion on this point.
The politics of exception is fascism. That is what it is. The argument that the sovereign must be able to act outside the law in moments of emergency — that the state of exception requires a power that cannot be reviewed, cannot be constrained, cannot be checked — is not a sophisticated legal theory. It is the theoretical architecture of authoritarianism, developed by Carl Schmitt, adopted by the Nazi legal apparatus, and now being retailed in American law schools and opinion pages as a form of sober constitutional prudence.
If that is not clear to everyone watching at home by now, then you have managed to convince yourself that fascism is not fascism, and is something else entirely.
You are wrong about that.
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The storm is not coming. The storm is here. Most people have not yet felt it — the supply shock moving through global energy and food chains has not yet reached their grocery bills and heating costs, though it will, and soon. The constitutional order is fraying in ways that the ordinary instruments of civic life were not designed to register. The people who should be sounding the alarm are debating the finer points of executive power doctrine.
Tick, tock.
History does not wait for the commentariat to reach consensus. It does not pause while serious people finish explaining why the unserious people have a point. It moves. And the people who are standing still, calculating whether the situation requires them to act with the full weight of their oaths and their offices and their humanity — they are making a choice. Inaction is a choice. Silence is a choice. Normalcy is a choice, when normalcy is no longer the accurate description of what is happening.
The climax of this moment is coming. The only question that remains is what side of it you will be on when it arrives — and what you will have done, or failed to do, while the clock was still ticking.
"The center has not held" We are finally at that point.
Your assessment is not understated. The Great Spanking is upon us.