When politics move quickly, as has happened in the past three months, people lose their bearings and their judgment.
Politics does not have the dramatic practice of excising time that is irrelevant to the story. Like having a unity of place, drama also has a unity of time. The dramatic events of “Oedipus Rex” happen quickly through arranging timely descriptions of events in the past to be related from an introduced speaker. Jane Austen does the same thing in “Pride and Prejudice” when Kitty reveals that Darcy was present at her wedding and that Shakespeare, in the words of Ophelia, describes what Hamlet was like before he went off to Wittenberg, he having been “the glass of fashion”. So politics seems languid and undramatic because it takes so long to unfold in real time, savoring the dramatic moments like a debate or election night, forgiving the languages where nothing much happens for the juicy moments when it does. Be patient. Something revealing, something novel, will show up sooner or later. Meanwhile, an American election season lasts for a year and a half to build up and you have to pay attention to see an important bit olf legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act, is wending its way through Congress from committee hearings and amendments and preliminary votes and then final votes, the opposition using time delaying tactics to stretch the time even further. Most people will not hear of a proposal until it becomes signed into law.
But sometimes political time moves more quickly, events speeding ahead and even multiple events going on at the same time. That happened when Hitler took over Germany in the first hundred days he took office. There was the Reichstag fire and the emergency powers and the appointment of Nazis to supervise academic departments in universities. Mussolini moved quickly from a march on Rome to being appointed leader of the government. The same thing happened in the American Revolution whereby time was telescoped so that it took just two years between the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest, to Lexington and Concord, though that may have been long enough for American patriots to absorb into their heads what they were contemplating before engaging in war, just as Southerners had twenty years or more to think about whether they wanted to secede from the Union.
People lose their bearings when political time moves quickly. They are swaying into polarizing points of view and extreme rhetorical stances, like “Liberty or Death”. The French changed from a parliamentary form of government with the National Assembly to a frenzy of murder under the Jacobins in the time of two years. People become preoccupied with politics, something more than a vocation or a distraction but the heart and soul of a people, while most people most of the time are indifferent to politics and need to be encouraged to bother to vote. At those high pressure times, however, people are anxious to push to the next stage rather than wait out its process.
The consequences of speeded up time are serious. People can’t evaluate each of a number of events when they come in a flurry and yet each of them, as bizarre as some of them may be, become temporarily engaging, like the idea that Trump could get a third term. People are likely to be interested in the plat de jour rather than the standard menu. Moreover, politics can grab attention and make it seem more important than the conventions that guide people, as when people call themselves “citizens”, as they did in the French Revolution, and act on outlandish and bloodthirsty thoughts. Freud thought that the First World War had unleashed previously controlled feelings. If politics is the alternative to war, what happens when in a war to restrain politics? A lot happens in wars that are then acceptable including the violation of political processes. It is amazing that the American North retained its Constitutional forms during the Civil War and so do the Israelis that are at war throughout their existence as a nation, as did Japan to the point of providing an orderly transfer of power to the Allies after they surrendered. The economic chaos in the decade after World War I in Germany shows how people can misjudge whether Hitler can be trusted inside the government.
The structure of narrative is different in fiction and in political reality. Plays elide time so that there is no need to linger with relevant events just so plays will gain verisimilitude, but in Victorian novels people do go on long walks, or at least indicate there are long walks that have an extended time, and do not snow people eating or defecation except for rare and pointed exemptions in “Tom Jones” and “Don Quixote". Another significant reorganization of fiction is that there are main plots and subplots, these latter kind used to highlight the main plot or provide comic relief from it as happens when the marriage of to Mr. Collins in “Pride and Prejudice” is a baseline of the usual merely accommodating marriage while Elizabeth and Darcey have to weather their trials and tribulations to overcome each of their both pride and prejudice. The romance of Lydia and Mr. Wickham is another cautionary tale about how romance can go wrong but also a plot device whereby Elizabeth can discover what an honorable and generous man Darcy could be. What happens in ordeal politics is that there are multiple plots that overlap and only developments will tell which one of those will become paramount, as when the plot of abolition came to become a central plot for the Civil War rather than the plot of the restoration of the union, that again becoming the major plot soon after the war ended.
The quickening of the political pace seems to me to be coming so during our present political moment, when Trump ascended to his second Presidential term.His first Hundred Days have seen unprecedented destruction to countervail the Hundred Days of obstruction during FDR and in fact are wrecking institutions that are older than FDR, turning back health and other regulations that go back to TR and agencies more recent and Republican sponsored such as the EPA and USAID, many of them of dubious legality, such as cl;opposing the Institute for Peace which is a federally chartered but independently funded and run organization.
The pace is so quickening because the various plots are happening simultaneously and each have independent timelines and it is not clear which of these plots will most engage public attention. There are the actions whereby the Trump administration dismantles federal agencies such as USAID and Social Security without congressional authority to close them down. That has ravaged the federal workforce and those who receive federal funds and services and a response to those actions are lawsuits but the timeline on suits and subsequent appeals based on the power of Congress to insist that the executive branch administer rather than abrogate congressional mandates will be delayed and time consuming before these matters are resolved. The same will be the case with Americans and legal and illegal aliens who are deported without due process though habeas corpus seems such a vital part of American law that legal responses should get emergency responses. Harassment of universities and law firms for political reasons is also juridically questionable but will continue until courts get around treating these matters.
Also prominent and topsy turvy events that people might find amusing, bemusing, or unsettling, are actions taken or announced in foreign policy so that Trump plans to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal and take over Canada, though he has toned down speaking of Canada as the Fifty First State, though continuing to disparage Europe and so leading Canada and Europe to announce that they do not regard the United States as friendly and will act accordingly to take countermeasures and rely without the United States. There is a strain between the understanding between America and Europe that has existed since World War II and now and that between America and Canada that has lasted for 150 years and that alone would make political time move quickly.
A quicker response to all these activities might be popular opinion as indicated by loud town hall meetings and a record Senate speech by Corey Booker. But Liberals and Progressives are premature in thinking that what they consider the worst is being answered at least in that the largest impact of Trump’s initiatives which is the deportation of millions of undocumented aliens,. Has barely begun in that Congress has just authorized the funds for housing and then expelling those people, a mass immigration unprecedented in American history. Moreover, it is apparent that the public does not yet have a taste for dramatic dissent or protest as happened in the Fifties and Sixties with civil rights and when, even more, many Conservatives, such as Everett Dirksen, thought that it was past time to get rid of segregation, American society having evolved to this point rather than thrust upon it, and that the main power of the people is at the ballot box which is still a year and a half away from now. Liberals and Progressives are therefore over reading the fact that Wisconsin elected a Liberal to its Supreme Court and that two cherry red Congressional districts had their last November margins of victory halved, that interpreted to mean that Republicans are in danger of losing Congress big, budget another way of interpreting it is that as Hillary said, Trumpists are deplorable and irredeemable, remaining steadfast despite the upheavals since January 20th, It is premature to predict an outcome when we are in the midst of the whirlwind however much people would prefer to find their bearings on some tried and true formula about how and when freezies calm down and what is left of the aftermath. At the moment there is just anxiety which fuels rash beliefs and actions while some people I know are just disregarding politics while the political frenzy either ends or triumphs over America.
In the fictional world, there is a drive to understand character. Most people are pedestrian and so easily explained, and some people are extraordinary, and so are subject to explanation or even mysterious. Observers are out to understand what Hamlet is about and why Iago hates Othello so much. Finding out a character is one of the rewards of fiction. In political time, however, motives are less important than consequences. The OSS had experts look into Hitler’s character not to understand it but to help guess what he might do. Diplomats pride themselves on assessing actions rather than motives.
The same is the case with another Trump incentive that is helping time race ahead, which are tariffs, those imposed just yesterday and likely to be more unsettling than any olf the inputs delivered by the President since January 20th. No one much cares why Trump is fixated on tariffs or his rationale for proposing them. What people care about are the consequences of tariffs to the American and the world economy, everyone, at this point, from all parts of the political spectrum, that they will have serious consequences to economic and political and international issues, but not certain what they will be. Stay tuned for a while to ever heightened anxiety.