On the Toppling of Statues

In the latest round of the imbroglio involving the death of George Floyd, the focus has moved from looting stores to toppling statues. This probably serves multiple purposes. First off, some of the stores represent actually important economic interests, and blue city mayors still somewhat know who’s paying the bills. Not so much that they’re willing to stand up to a mob in the process of looting, of course. But enough that if rage can be directed towards more socially useful outlets, like destroying statues of people liked by conservatives, then so much the better. It keeps the mob fired up in the leadup to the 2020 elections, but harms no vital interests of anybody important.

The initial outrage focused on monuments to the Confederates. It’s 2020, so the Civil War that ended in 1865 is of course a pressing political issue. Among the various ironies is that today’s progressive mob takes a far harsher line than the actual men who fought and died to defeat the Confederacy. Lincoln told the band to play Dixie. Grant let the surrendering Confederate officers keep their weapons and horses. Reconstruction may not have been much fun if you were a civilian in the South, but there’s no doubt that there was a genuine attempt to unify the country after the war finished, and respecting each other’s heroes was a way to preserve a cultural truce. If we’re all going to be stuck together in the Hotel California of countries that you can check out of but never leave, we may as well try to rub along together. This is not a very popular sentiment anymore, it suffices to say.

But as has been obvious to anyone paying attention, the people who wanted statues toppled were never going to stop with the Confederates. Eventually they would assuredly come for Jefferson, Washington, and anyone else who owned slaves. Sure enough, Washington statues have been vandalized in New York and Portland. The city of Columbus, Ohio, recently took down their statue of Columbus, proving that the "is this headline from the Onion or the NYT" game gets harder every day. In case you thought this was part of a principled and thought out set of targets, they also vandalized statues of Norwegian anti-slavery crusaders, Catholic saints, and Cervantes, who was himself a slave. 

Like many things that seem obvious in hindsight, statues exist in only two types of societies – those with a very high level of trust, and extremely heavily-policed authoritarian states. This realization is only slowly occurring to people as it becomes obvious that America is no longer a high trust society, and all sorts of institutions that relied on this now fail to work. Accurate political polling is another casualty, for instance. “Hello stranger who we just called! You don’t know who we are, but do you support the government? You’ve got no financial incentive to tell us, and we’re recording your answer in a database!”. The amazing thing is that anybody ever answered truthfully at all.

A statue in a public space is like the cultural equivalent of a foreign embassy. In the face of concerted domestic opposition, it is completely indefensible from a military point of view. In theory, the domestic government could expend huge resources to police it night and day to stop the mob burning it down. But this is rarely worth it, either for an embassy, or a statue. At the point that you have to do this for any extended period of time, you’re facing a losing battle, and you should probably pack it up and go home. A statue is even worse – an embassy is at least trivially protected against minor attacks, because it has to defend the lives of real people who are important at least to the home country. A statue is physically solid, but socially fragile – an undefended object of art and beauty that can only exist with the consent of a huge majority of the populace. This can be because the person is almost universally revered. It can be because people are tolerant of other people’s heroes, even if they’re not their own. It can be because there’s very strong norms against vandalism. Or, like the statues of Saddam, it can be a flex on the populace under threat of being killed or mutilated for disrespecting the sovereign.

Increasingly, none of these conditions hold in modern America. This may seem hyperbolic to say. But let’s put it this way. Suppose you are in charge of an insurance business. Someone comes to you wanting to obtain insurance for their statue. What annual premium, in terms of percentage of replacement cost, would you charge for a randomly chosen statue in America right now? I’d say the lowest would be the Martin Luther King statue in DC. But the rest? If the cost were less than 25% of replacement, I’d be kind of amazed. There'd probably be a considerable number where the premium would be above 100%, on the assumption that if it got rebuilt, it would be torn down again before the year was out. 

The whole thing is strikingly reminiscent of Godwin’s Law:  “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” 

Every day, the line between frenzied internet discussion and real life gets blurrier. Social media, which has been a complete poison on society, amplifies and shortens the clickbait/outrage/vindictive response/ schadenfreude/retweet cycle. Americans have become addicted to the pleasure of righteous indignation, and the media, traditional and social, happily provides.

The literal mob has become indistinguishable from the mob of the Facebook feed. And as outrage porn and mob violence goes on, the probability that someone crazy and motivated decides that a given statue is actually comparable to Hitler goes to one.

Eventually, all the statues will get torn down.

If you don’t believe me yet, don’t worry, you will.

And there are many things one could opine about regarding this. The loss of aesthetics. The loss of historical understanding and tradition. The loss of heroes.

But I want to focus on one bit in particular.

When the statues of Washington and Jefferson all get removed, and nobody stands for the national anthem any more so they stop playing it, and cities and towns start deciding they don’t want to celebrate the 4th of July because America’s founding was racist back in 1619, and first the loonie fringe then the New York Times start writing articles wondering if we should rename Washington DC to Kingtown…

…at what point in all this do people realize that there are literally no more symbols that unify Americans as a people anymore?

That there are no more symbols of the general feeling of mutual camaraderie and shared history and purpose as a nation, because there actually is no general feeling of mutual camaraderie and shared history and purpose as a nation?

And if you, like me, think that the above statements already apply, then the current governing arrangements and general social compact may be a great deal more fragile and brittle right now than most people give it credit for.

People think about governmental collapse like death – something that only happens to other people, but never to me personally. Well, one day, for the nation as a whole, it will. And when it did, for nations in the past, it was generally not anticipated by most of the major parties very shortly beforehand, whether it’s the Fall of Rome, the Russian revolution, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. This doesn’t mean it’s going to happen soon in America, of course. But it does mean that your feeling that it probably isn’t likely now is not actually a strong signal one way or the other, because it never seemed likely, even when it was imminent. So you should revert at least to the unconditional probability, which is low, but not that low.

And if you were to start wondering about useful conditioning information, a pretty good place to start would be widespread belief among the elites of the illegitimacy of the governing regime. 

Of course, we struggle to see this in America, because we don’t have clear language with which to express what “the governing regime” is. We can say if people disliked Czar Nicholas II, or even the Communist Party. But what would it mean to dislike the US government as a whole? It certainly doesn’t map to disliking Trump – in that case, there’s near universal elite hatred. Are people still sentimental about elections and the democratic process? The attachment seems to mostly exist as an expression of hate – a way to stick it to the other side. It’s been a very long time since I’ve heard the left express the sentiment that, sure, our guy lost, but they lost in a democratic election, and in the end that’s more important. If Trump loses, I don’t expect much of this on the right either, save the obviously useless grifters of the professional Never Trump class. And if not that, then what? The civil service? Don't make me laugh. Our robust economy creating broad prosperity? Bueller?

In other words, if there is no substantial opposition to the current governing arrangements, this may simply stem from a) a lack of imagination about alternatives, and b) a lack of clear coordination on what would replace the status quo. In East Germany, you had both. Levis and Rock and Roll were on display on the other side of the wall, and collapse just meant handing over the keys to City Hall to those guys. Now, it’s a little thornier. But if you were to characterise USG as a “regime”, the way that Communist East Germany was a regime, or Czarist Russia was a regime – do you see very much love for the USG regime going around at the moment, on either side of the political aisle? It's hard to see this, because a regime is always "them" - the governing, as opposed to the governed. Americans are trained to see themselves as the governing, due to the absurd fiction about the importance, both practical and spiritual, of  the pico-watt of political power they get to exercise at the polling booth every four years. This delusion holds true, notwithstanding that pushing the same button keeps producing the same unsatisfactory results. This delusion, plus sheer inertia, may be the only glue holding this jalopy together. Every year, it gets a little dicier.

At the moment, I don’t see anything dramatic happening before the election at least. I was somewhat nervous on the main Saturday night of protests recently, however, notwithstanding my previous post.

But let’s put it this way. If there were a VIX index for political outcomes, my estimate of the 5 year value just went up substantially this past month.

You cannot have a nation destroy all the symbols of itself and expect everything to just proceed as before.