An Update from Inside the House of Cards

A note on the discovery that nothing was holding it up, that nothing was ever holding it up, and that we are all going to be perfectly fine, mostly, depending on which room you happen to be in.

It has come to our attention that the American constitutional system, long admired around the world for its elegant architecture of checks and balances, was not, in the strictest sense, a building. The building was, on inspection, more of a suggestion. The walls were drawn on paper. The doors were ceremonial. The roof was understood to be there but had not, on close examination, ever actually been installed. We have lived inside this building for two hundred and fifty years under the impression that it was sturdy. The impression was, on the whole, sustained by the polite agreement of everyone inside not to test the walls. The walls have now been tested. The walls were drawings. The drawings have been blown away. We are now, technically speaking, outdoors.

This came as a surprise to most of us, although it ought not to have. The Founders, who are now invoked at every opportunity by people who have not read them and who would have horrified them in person, were quite clear about the fragility of what they had built. They wrote, repeatedly, that the system would only function if the participants in it agreed to function. They observed that no piece of paper, however cleverly worded, could compel a government to behave constitutionally if the people inside the government decided not to. They wrote this down. They wrote it down quite a lot. Their warnings have been preserved in the form of quotes, which now appear on the LinkedIn profiles of people who are, in the actual conduct of their offices, ignoring those warnings with great fluency.

Washington warned about factions running amok. The factions are running amok. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex has been merged with the technology-industrial complex and is now negotiating with the political-industrial complex about the terms of merger with the entertainment-industrial complex, after which the four-way conglomerate will, presumably, run for office, and win, which will be considered a private matter rather than a public concern. Lincoln warned that the danger to the American experiment would come from within. The danger has come from within. The danger has, in fact, been holding press conferences. The press conferences are well-attended. The members of the press shout questions. The danger answers them. The questions and the answers are then transcribed and posted on platforms owned by the same conglomerates mentioned above. Everyone has been very productive. The system, by every measurable indicator of activity, is functioning at unprecedented capacity. The system is also, in any sense that would have made sense to Washington, no longer there.

The most striking feature of the present moment is the calm. The system is being dismantled in real time, not behind closed doors but in front of cameras, with daily updates, on a documented schedule, by people who have explained their plans in considerable detail. There is no conspiracy. The dismantling is the policy. The policy is the campaign promise. The campaign promise was kept. The kept campaign promise is the news, and the news is the dismantling, and the dismantling is being received by the population with a kind of absent-minded patience, as if it were a long traffic jam on a road they had not particularly wanted to take in the first place. The population is not, on the whole, in the streets. The population is, on the whole, on its phones. The phones are showing the population what is happening, in real time, with commentary. The population is reading the commentary. The population has opinions about the commentary. The opinions are not, in any actionable sense, leaving the phones.

This is the most interesting thing about the collapse of constitutional democracy in the early twenty-first century, and it is the thing that historians, fifty years from now, will struggle to explain. The mechanism by which previous democracies collapsed was force. Soldiers in the streets. Tanks in the squares. Newspapers shut down. Politicians arrested. The mechanism by which this one is collapsing is something else. The newspapers are still publishing. The politicians are still in office. The streets are calm. The mechanism is, on inspection, the simple expedient of doing the unconstitutional thing, calling it constitutional, and watching to see whether anyone will stop you. Nobody has stopped anyone. The mechanism continues. It is being refined. Each iteration teaches the next iteration what works. The system is learning, in real time, how to dismantle itself, and the lesson is that the dismantling can be accomplished without resistance, provided it is performed with sufficient confidence and announced in advance.

The Congress, in its capacity as the legislative branch and the supposed check on executive overreach, has been performing the role of the worried bystander. It has held hearings. It has expressed concern. It has, on several occasions, issued strongly worded letters. The letters have been received. The letters have been filed. The filing has been efficient. The Congress has not, in the technical sense, used any of the actual powers it possesses to constrain the executive, because using those powers would require members of the Congress to vote against the leader of their party, and the leader of their party has indicated that voting against him would be unwise, and the members of the Congress have agreed that he has a point. The Congress has therefore done what it can, which is to write the letters and hold the hearings. This has been described as oversight. The word “oversight” has, in this context, acquired its second meaning.

The Supreme Court has approached the situation with the patience and discretion for which it is justly famous. It has declined to rule on the most urgent questions. When forced to rule, it has ruled in ways that, on inspection, expand executive power without quite saying so. The opinions are long. The opinions are well-reasoned. The opinions cite precedent in such intricate detail that very few people read all the way to the end, and the people who do read all the way to the end have, in many cases, been employed by the people the opinions are protecting. The Court has, in this period, achieved something genuinely innovative. It has demonstrated that constitutional jurisprudence, performed at sufficient sophistication, can produce any outcome whatsoever while maintaining the appearance of being constrained by law. The performance is impressive. The Court is widely admired by the people whose interests it serves and ignored by the people whose interests it does not. This is considered, by the relevant authorities, an entirely satisfactory arrangement.

The press, which has the unenviable task of describing all this to a population that does not particularly want it described, has settled into a kind of professional rhythm. Each new violation is reported. Each report is filed. Each filing is followed by analysis. The analysis is sober. The analysis observes that this is unprecedented, that this is concerning, that this represents a departure from established norms. The next day, the next violation occurs, and the cycle resumes. The press is, in the strict sense, doing its job. The job, on inspection, has been redefined. The job used to be to surface information that would, in some cumulative way, generate political response. The job now is to surface information that will, in some cumulative way, generate engagement. The engagement is generated. The engagement is monetized. The political response, by some quiet structural failure that nobody has the energy to fully describe, does not arrive. The press has succeeded at its actual job, which is to keep the audience watching. The audience is watching. The audience is, by every available metric, watching more than ever. The watching has not, however, in the technical sense, accomplished anything else.

This is the part that requires real comedy to describe, because no straight description can quite capture it. The system that was supposed to protect the system from being dismantled has been redirected, by a thousand small adjustments over forty years, into a system that observes the dismantling and reports on it. The reporting is thorough. The reporting is, in many cases, excellent. The reporting will be cited, decades from now, by historians studying the collapse, and the historians will be impressed by the quality of the reporting, and they will note, with mild bewilderment, that the quality of the reporting did not, on its own, prevent any of the events the reporting described. The reporting was the substitute for prevention. The substitute became, over time, the entire activity. The activity continues. The collapse continues. They are now, in some functional sense, the same thing.

Internationally, the situation is being received with the polite horror reserved for diplomatic events that nobody can comment on directly. America’s allies, who have spent the better part of a century arranging their security and their economies around the assumption of American constitutional continuity, are now reassessing. The reassessment is happening quietly. The quiet is itself a feature of the situation. Nobody wants to say out loud what the reassessment concludes, because saying it out loud would have consequences, and the consequences would arrive faster than anyone is prepared for. So the allies say nothing of substance. They issue statements expressing continued commitment to the partnership. They begin, simultaneously and without comment, to build redundancy. They are quietly preparing to live without the American security guarantee. They are doing this while smiling at the cameras and shaking hands with American officials, who are also smiling, who also know, who are also pretending not to know.

The adversaries, meanwhile, are not reassessing. They have already concluded. They are now doing what people do when they have concluded that the rules are not being enforced, which is to test the rules, slowly, with increasing confidence, in increasingly important ways. Russia tests the rules in Ukraine. China tests the rules in the South China Sea. Iran tests the rules in the Middle East. Each test, when it does not produce serious consequences, becomes the floor for the next test. The floor is descending. The descent is being narrated, in real time, by the press. The narration is being received, in real time, by the population, which is doing what it can, which is mostly to scroll. The scrolling continues. The descent continues. The two activities have not yet found, in any meaningful sense, an interface.

And then there is Gaza, which deserves its own paragraph, because it is the moment when the whole exercise stopped pretending to be about anything. The president of the United States announced, on camera, that he intended to remove two million Palestinians from their homes and develop the resulting cleared territory as luxury real estate. He said this in the tone of a man pitching a project to his accountant. He showed renderings. The renderings included palm trees. The renderings did not include the people who had been removed, because the renderings were of the after, and the people, in the rendering, were the before. The world watched this happen. The world’s reaction was to issue statements. The statements were received. The statements were filed. The renderings were broadcast on every major news platform on Earth. The renderings, in some quiet structural sense, were not refuted. They were observed. The observation continues. The renderings are, presumably, being refined.

This is, on close inspection, the funniest part of the current moment, and it is the part that produces the most uncomfortable laughter, because it is so clarifying. We have spent eighty years, since the end of the Second World War, building an international order on the principle that ethnic cleansing was the worst thing humans could do to each other, and that anyone who proposed it would be, at minimum, ostracized. We are now watching the proposal be made by the leader of the country that built the order, on television, with renderings, and the response of the international community is to issue statements. The statements continue to be issued. The proposal continues to be elaborated. The order, which was supposed to make this kind of proposal unthinkable, has demonstrated that the unthinkability was a function of agreement, and the agreement, on close inspection, was always going to last only as long as the people in the order felt like maintaining it. The people stopped feeling like maintaining it. The order, accordingly, ended. We are now in whatever comes next, which has not been named yet, but which appears to involve, among other things, luxury real estate.

The optimists, asked how this all ends, have proposed that local and state governments will step up. They have proposed that more than half of the citizens will vote. They have proposed that the old design might have needed an update anyway, and that the current crisis is, in some bracing way, an opportunity. These proposals are charming. They are also, on close examination, the same proposals that have been made at every previous stage of every previous democratic collapse, by the same kinds of well-meaning observers, and they have, on the historical record, never quite worked. The states do not step up, because the states are run by members of the same parties currently overseeing the dismantling. The voters do not turn out, because the voters are exhausted, and the exhaustion is the point, and the system has been carefully engineered to produce it. The old design does not get updated, because updating the design would require the use of the design, and the design has been quietly disabled. The optimism is real. The optimism is also, in any structural sense, decoration.

The honest summary of where we are is that we have arrived, after two hundred and fifty years of constitutional experiment, at the moment when it turns out that the experiment was always conditional. The conditions were the willingness of the participants to participate in good faith. The participants have, on the whole, declined to continue participating in good faith. The experiment, accordingly, is over. We are now in the next experiment, which has not been named, and which is being designed in real time by people who do not appear to have read the relevant literature, and which is going to produce results that will be studied, decades from now, by historians who will not, in any sense that would comfort us, be us.

This will, in the broadest sense, work out. It will work out for some people. It is already working out for the small group at the top of the new arrangement, who are doing better than ever, and who report, in their public statements, that the new arrangement is necessary, urgent, and basically unavoidable. It will work out, in a more attenuated sense, for the people who manage to stay close to that group, by means of the various adaptations described in the previous essay. It will not work out, in the sense that things were working out before, for most of the rest of us. We will not, however, in the strict sense, suffer dramatically. We will suffer in the way modern populations suffer, which is gradually, expensively, with declining services, deteriorating institutions, and the constant low-grade hum of a country that no longer believes in itself. We will not be in the streets. We will be on our phones. The phones will continue to show us what is happening. We will continue to have opinions. The opinions will continue, in the technical sense, not to matter.

Hope, the original essay’s author offered, in a moment of admirable transparency, in a closing line that did him credit. He was hoping for the best. He admitted he might be naive. He said it anyway, which is the most American thing about the whole essay, and which, in any honest accounting, is the part of the American character that is going to survive this, because it has always been the part that survives everything. The hope is not strategic. The hope is constitutional, in the deeper sense — built into the people, not the document. The document was always going to fail eventually, because all documents fail eventually. The hope was the load-bearing element. The hope, mercifully, persists.

This is what we have. The institutions are gone, or going. The norms are gone. The agreed-upon facts are gone. The international order is gone. What remains is the hope of a few million ordinary people who are not, in any organized sense, in charge of anything, but who continue, in their small individual lives, to act as if the country they were promised still existed. They are wrong about it existing. They are right about acting as if it did. The acting-as-if is the only mechanism by which the country could possibly be restored, and the restoration, if it comes, will come from them, slowly, against the prevailing winds, with no support from above, on a timeline that none of us will fully see.

In the meantime, the dismantling proceeds.

It proceeds calmly.

It proceeds on schedule.

The eggs, you may have noticed, have not gotten cheaper.

They are not going to.

They never were.