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There’s an interesting staff writer at The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, who among other things is a sort of rare left-wing Black critic of left-wing academia (a sort of “origin story” here). When interviewed about said piece, and touching also on his opinions about the Arday scandal and aftermath, he was posed this question about not playing into the hands of conservative critics of left-wing academia (and left-wingers more broadly):
This had me thinking about “emergencyism” more broadly. I’m kind of coming around to the idea that this particular brainworm is, at risk of “both-sideism”, a pretty fundamental and widespread issue. On the left we have the above position. On the right we have a parallel idea that Republicans and Trump specifically only might have this small window of time to ‘correct’ and even avenge mistakes of the past, so they need to be thorough and extreme in order to punish those who allegedly schemed against them, abused institutional trends or structure for years, or implemented anything vaguely woke-sounding. Potentially even moderates, maybe they vote in low quality but comparatively “harmless” candidates for office too much (especially in the primary phase, to count).
Emergencies of course are dangerous, historically speaking. While there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, we still note examples as classic as the Reichstag fire and associated “emergencies”, Sulla in Roman times, various military juntas; we have Japanese internment, post-9/11 AUMF abuse (especially post-Iraq), assorted Cold War surveillance abuses, etc locally. At least top of my head, IRL they are legion. Real emergencies, abused.
Yet emergencyism as depicted is actually about moral or political panics, and the lowered self-standards that can accompany them. We’re talking here about witch trials, McCarthyism, satanic panic, Iraq WMDs, super predator fears, so on.
Harper himself I think feels a bit extra jaded because in his telling, excessive and even immoral racial justice drives occurred simultaneously with him getting tenure as a university professor and also the university’s unionization drive failing (crushed in part by the same firm Amazon used to suppress their own).
Properly, emergencyism seems to be a subset of a type of blatant partisanship, which is interesting because most of the advocates likely don’t think of themselves as partisans. Potentially it’s also downstream of bad-faith politics. However I tend to think that that’s too convenient an excuse. Most people aren’t actually thinking about things in terms of game theory. And ultimately this is not about “the other side” - it’s about YOU. What are MY morals? Obviously morals are cheap until challenged, and aren’t worth much if they never survive a challenge. It takes courage for a political group to embark on a course of self-betterment even in the face of dastardly opposition. Right?
Or are we totally in a post-moral political hellscape where might makes right and morals are dead?
(And more topically - do you agree that emergencyism is a thing on the left, and do you think it’s a thing on the right two, or that’s the wrong lens to use to make sense of the Trumpist blob?)
There's a pretty infamous StoneToss comic about "what if the shoe was on the other foot", in case the whole Flight 93 Election spiel wasn't enough of an example of emergencyism on the right. So that's a true matter.
One trouble is that it's hard to tell faux emergencyism from genuine emergencies. StoneToss's author has not, notably, been shot in the back of the head. Hillary Clinton has not driven an aircraft into a government building. Trump has not been lynching any academics.
At the same time, anti-immigration activists reasonably expect a mass amnesty and citizenship drive, since that's what immigration maximalists say that's what they want, and see 10m-40m new citizens as making their positions untenable for a generation directly, in a self-reinforcing way. Trump fans -- and even haters -- can notice that the man was nearly assassinated, had several other serious assassination attempts, and had every other available stop pulled to try and prevent him from having a fair election, including a court order to not count already-cast ballots. Japanese Internment was driven in no small part by the Ni'ihau incident and it doesn't take a paranoid schizophrenic to think about the military ramifications, super-predator theory had a burgeoning set of extremely shocking juvenile violence, there were actual paid-by-Soviet communists even if McCarthyism didn't seem to care about focusing on them, so on.
I'm probably the softer side of the anti-academics. My positive vision for the future involves shoveling the contents of academic journals through an LLM, checking responses for phrases like "The fact that nobody on a team that includes both emergency physicians and biomedical engineers raised this concern suggests nobody stopped to think about it, which is a different kind of failure than not knowing", and then rubbing both the authors and reviewers' noses in it.
But I want that because I think it is an emergency for a sizable fraction of academic researchers, and there's a lot of people who want to go quite a lot further.
And then on the gripping hand, it's very unlikely that Ni'ihau would have generalized to an entire genetic populations, super-predatory theory didn't even have a good model for what was driving juvenile violence and was directionally wrong about what the future held (even if the revisionist take is depending on statistics that are massaged to hell and back), and McCarthyism postdated actual bad acts like the Rosenbergs and instead seemed to focus on useful idiots being useful idiots. Dilulio's estimates of 30k hyperviolent inner-city youths would have been bad, but it would have been the 1980s-bad, not The Purge. An alternate universe where Trump got Kirk'd on national television is a worse one, but it's worse in the sense of civil wars rather than worse in the sense of the conservative project being over.
The failure mode for the academics is reduced funding, loyalty oaths, and Kolmogorov complicity. Ignoring for now how much the same specific people say isn't a big deal for their opponents, this isn't the end of the world.
Which, to be fair to the emergencyists, isn't their red line. And there clearly should be red lines: no matter how much 'the constitution isn't a suicide pact' turned into a really stupid applause light, both as a matter of law and morals, everyone had principles that aren't their ultimate principle, and yet still matter. I'll pick up litter, but I won't run across highway traffic to do so. I'll oppose being rude, but I won't shoot someone solely for being rude.
Meanwhile, it's easy to show how everyone else is drawing unprincipled exceptions that only cover their own or limit their enemies, or taking legal formalism to extremes, and very hard to notice when you are yourself.
I dunno. It's a category that reals, but it doesn't really illuminate.
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The Flight 93 election thesis would support the emergencyism of the Right.
But I don't see it as the central tendency of the Trumpist blob. That's much more personalistic, and Trump himself doesn't seem to think of the political situation as an emergency. He has fits of pique and rhetorical nastiness, but to get on his good side all you need to do is be a bit friendly and he rolls over like a puppy hoping for a belly rub. That's not someone worried about the fate of the Republic. And the Right mostly follows his cues.
One thing, though: you can name emergencies identified by thinkers on both political sides, and they're all wrong. The US would muddle through those. But there is an eminent existential emergency, and neither side is seriously grappling with it: AI. Right now it's just an amorphous recognition that something big is coming, manifested by the public into complaints about data centers drinking all the world's water. But as it becomes more concrete, we are going to see a rapid shift away from our current preoccupations.
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I once read an article criticising Naomi Klein, in which the author pointed out that, in 2007, Klein published a book called The Shock Doctrine, whose central thesis was the existence of a strategy called "disaster capitalism", in which political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. In her subsequent book, This Changes Everything, Klein argued that the climate crisis cannot be addressed in the current era of neoliberalism, and hence that the only solution is to instate Full Communism.
Huh. Political actors exploit the chaos caused by natural disasters to implement unpopular economic policies, you say?
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I find this attitude among journalists and academics - i.e. roles in society that are purported to be about seeking and publicizing truth and facts (obviously trade secrets and whatnot being exceptions) - to be infuriating. If you actually have a belief that these things are important, one of the first things that you should be willing to ignore and marginalize are your own personal partisan biases and ideological commitments, because any amount of education should make it obvious that those are some of the most powerful forces that drive one's behavior into irrational and incorrect directions. As such, if some truth or fact would "feeding into" the enemies' campaign, I should embrace it and be even more gung-ho about investigating it and publicizing it. That's the only way that I can credibly claim to care about discovering and teaching truth, rather than to care about pushing forward my ideological biases while wearing academia as a skinsuit to make people believe that I'm searching for the truth.
If revealing and spreading some scientific truth would play into my enemies' hands, then I ought to play into my enemies' hands.
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I would agree that, broadly defined, emergencyism is pretty common. Perhaps it would be better to call it a "war mentality." Because for the most part, the rhetoric I have seen is framed along the lines of "this is necessary in light of the circumstances" as opposed to "this is only temporary," although the two arguments are really not all that different.
In any event, here's my question: Suppose you are dealing with a political opponent which has an emergencyist or war mentality towards your group. Rightly or wrongly, they see your group as a dire threat and they feel justified in doing what would otherwise be seen as pretty bad things in order to defeat you. Would you agree that under such circumstances, the rational thing to do is to adopt a similar mentality yourself?
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You rediscovered State of Fear by Michael Crichton only 2 decades later.
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Ironic, exactly what an authoritarian would say.
True emergencies exist and probably warrant more authoritarian leadership (it’s in many constitutions, e.g. the US president is also military leader). But to succeed in a true emergency the leader must be trusted by most subjects, and defer or resolve less urgent conflicts, e.g. offering large concessions on non-emergency issues (which should be most of them), and convincing that the emergency is real.
Neither party has done either. I’ll accept we’re in some sort of emergency (crazy politicians, Gen Z apathy, climate change and TFR collapse). I’m not remotely convinced a leader of any major party can lead us out.
And of course, this guy (attacking Arday criticism)’s fear is acting against himself. How will supporting Arday do anything against Trump authoritarianism? It seems like he has too much fear, blocking rationality. Although I think it really seems like he’s doing it for ingroup brownie points (maybe a raise or promotion).
You just brushed with a specific concept that emerged from Davos crowd in 2016, the specific term is polycrisis and they are in love with it since then. Like you mentioned, we have demographic crisis, climate crisis, mental health crisis and everything in between and more. It is a feature, not a bug - some of these like climate crisis or demographic crisis are just new fact of life that will stay with us for our lifetimes.
Moreover there are micro panics, this week it is the wife that strangled her three kids, and it seems that 10% of the world knows about it. Next week it will be something else. It is just a constant barrage of various issues, sense of endless anxiety that triggers basic psychological programming.
Everything is relative. How much of a state of emergency are we in? Is the doomsday clock ten seconds to midnight? Five milliseconds? And what does that mean in real time?
Real emergency powers, like involuntary confinement for suicide, make the situation better in the short term but worse in the medium to long term, point being there will be no long term if not enacted. If the “emergency” is long, the solution better work as long, or you just wasted time, in an emergency no less.
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This may be my own semantic skill issue, but it does seem like your shortening of his "state of emergency"ism to just 'emergencyism' loses something (even if you were trying to keep the idea but make the term more usable). It sounded like this concept was actually about there not even really being any emergency at all -- just the existence of political opposition as a boogeyman, which means all times can be characterized as being in a generalized potential state of emergency such that we can't afford to police political allies [right now]. Hence the classic example "this is the most important election of our lifetime, not the time to be overly-principled" every cycle.
Certainly seems like everyone partakes in this to varying degrees, although the anti-Trump era is characterized by a particularly zealous version of it for whatever reason. To find anyone avoiding the brainworm, you'd be looking for the heterodox/heretical people willing to be disagreeable (or at least those willing to talk to them). Or I suppose you'd be looking for a legit emergency, which may subjectively reach the level of being worth piping down and falling in line.
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