Political science and "The Great Erosion"
During the 2016 election, I wrote the occasional post on The Unmutual Political Blog about what I called, "the burn-it-down" theory of American politics. This was an idea that held some traction among the far-left, that if Donald Trump won, the result would be so disastrous as to lead to the rise of a new left, and a revival of the country, like how the Great Depression led to FDR, and the New Deal. I likened it to the philosophy of Ra's al Ghul, from Batman Begins, and various other comics.
What has happened instead? I'm going to try to coin a term. The Great Erosion. Along the lines of Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die, the guardrails of democracy have come off, checks and balances have ceased to function, and our democratic institutions no longer operate in any way that would have been recognizable just a few years ago. Yet, the economy is booming, there is no spike in crime rates, international situations are tense but not over-boiling, and generally speaking, what has happened is that the country has not burned down. It has eroded. Hence, The Great Erosion.
We have an unchecked executive. That is unprecedented in American history. Many elements of the Democratic Party have responded as though the country has burned down, and are on a glidepath to nominating the kind of far-left candidate who might have been a political reaction to that-- e.g. Sanders-- but the burn never happened. It has been an erosion.
Nevertheless, the erosion has created a political system that is so dramatically different from the one that existed four years ago that I find myself asking about the state of political science. This has influenced my teaching of late, in many ways, but currently, I wonder how much political science needs now, or will soon need to be discarded. When the USSR collapsed, the people who studied Soviet politics suddenly became students of a dead system.
A country with a new political system requires a new academic discipline. Hardly the most pressing problem, but it is my corner of the world.
Next week, something different. I'll write more about The Great Erosion, but I need to do something different.
What has happened instead? I'm going to try to coin a term. The Great Erosion. Along the lines of Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die, the guardrails of democracy have come off, checks and balances have ceased to function, and our democratic institutions no longer operate in any way that would have been recognizable just a few years ago. Yet, the economy is booming, there is no spike in crime rates, international situations are tense but not over-boiling, and generally speaking, what has happened is that the country has not burned down. It has eroded. Hence, The Great Erosion.
We have an unchecked executive. That is unprecedented in American history. Many elements of the Democratic Party have responded as though the country has burned down, and are on a glidepath to nominating the kind of far-left candidate who might have been a political reaction to that-- e.g. Sanders-- but the burn never happened. It has been an erosion.
Nevertheless, the erosion has created a political system that is so dramatically different from the one that existed four years ago that I find myself asking about the state of political science. This has influenced my teaching of late, in many ways, but currently, I wonder how much political science needs now, or will soon need to be discarded. When the USSR collapsed, the people who studied Soviet politics suddenly became students of a dead system.
A country with a new political system requires a new academic discipline. Hardly the most pressing problem, but it is my corner of the world.
Next week, something different. I'll write more about The Great Erosion, but I need to do something different.
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