17 July 2024. Violence | History

America is just a violent place // Making sense of the past in futures work [#588]

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1: America is just a violent place

The attempt to kill Donald Trump last week reveals, immediately, a couple of important things about America and about democratic politics.

On democratic politics it reveals the asymmetry about violence at the moment between the right and the centre. On America it reminds us that the country is a violent place, and violence has been a normal feature of its politics for something like 250 years now.

I’m not going to dwell on the asymmetry. But politicians of the centre, broadly defined, who believe in peaceful democratic transitions, have to respond to political violence by condemning it. Authoritarians use this contingently, advocating or encouraging violence when it suits them, and using the language of the centre when it does not.

I’m not going to go through the list of recent incidents where the US Republicans have done this, but fortunately I don’t need to because Heather Cox Richardson did it on her excellent newsletter the day after the attempt on Trump’s life.

And the list goes on and on. Here’s her analysis:

Republicans under Trump have increasingly advocated violence as a way to gain power because they know their unpopular positions cannot lead their candidates to victory in free and fair elections. In this moment, when there is still little evidence about yesterday’s tragedy, it appears they are projecting their own behavior onto Biden and the Democrats, blaming them for advocating violence when in fact, Biden and the Democrats have tried hard to enact commonsense gun safety laws and have consistently condemned the violent language and normalizing of political violence by Republicans.

(The ‘Proud Boys’ on the streets of Washington, December 2020. Photo: Geoff Livingston CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Flickr/ https://www.geofflivingston.com/portfolio.)

The second is about the level of violence in American political life, which is another case of American exceptionalism. Because political violence has an American history that goes back to the American Revolution

David Dayen wrote about this in The American Prospect, referencing in particular the work of the Robert Kreitner (new to me). Dayen describes Kreitner’s book Break It Up as “one of the best books” he’s read this decade.

[It] reframes American history as a history of perpetual disunion that, practically from the founding, has been on the verge of cracking apart. In fact, it did break apart under the Articles of Confederation, after 4,000 Massachusetts rebels nearly took over the Springfield Armory and the federal government realized it had no means to stop it... And it broke apart at Fort Sumter, triggering four years of civil war that in Kreitner’s retelling were more a culmination of events since the Revolution than anything out of character.

Dayen notes that there have been plots of some kind to attack 11 of the last 12 presidents. Overall,

four presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) have died from an assassin’s bullet; three others (Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and Trump) were shot; another three (Jackson, FDR, and Ford) were shot at... Taft, Hoover, Truman, Carter, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Trump, and Biden all saw attempts on their life thwarted. Arthur Bremer tried to shoot Nixon twice but couldn’t get a good angle on him, so instead he shot George Wallace.

Despite this history, which has been something of a drumbeat for 60 years, there has of course been no meaningful success in changing American laws on whether access to firearms should be restricted:

It’s a big country of violent people and easy access to weapons that can be fashioned to kill. And those realities exist in an undercurrent of a precarious union, a nation whose citizens don’t all look like each other and have always been uneasy in each other’s presence.

Robert Kreitner’s website has a good selection of his recent articles, and browsing through them you get a flavour of his thinking. His book, as you can maybe guess from the title, is a history of secession in the United States. By his account in an article in Slate, the book makes

an argument for considering some form of disunion as a possible solution to America’s troubles. In it, I hoped to offer an entirely new account of the history of this nation through the ever-present possibility of its demise: the difficulty of forming a union in the first place; the ceaseless threats to its integrity once it existed; the devastating war that broke it apart; the rancid compromises that only superficially knit it back together; the return, in recent years, of a long-forgotten sense of its fundamental fragility and, possibly, its impermanence.

An earlier piece, published in 2021 in the New York Review of Books in the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, suggests that we should start taking talk of secessionism seriously, although he also anticipates the possibility of low level persistent violence involving bombings and shootings, perhaps like the war in the north of Ireland in the 1970s, or like the sporadic American political violence of the 1960s. But:

Given... the country’s long history of separatist movements, and the tenuous, ever-shifting balance between state and federal power, secession remains the most likely form that a full breakdown in constitutional government would take. As America’s political dysfunction gets worse, talk of secession is likely to get more and more serious, until it isn’t talk at all.

Talk of secession has been on the rise since 2004. Around a third of Americans, from different parts of the political spectrum, are in favour of their own state seceding (it’s higher in Texas). There are historical parallels: as in the period before the civil war; demographics might be the ticking clock:

In 1860, Southern secessionists moved to quit the Union right after Lincoln’s victory because they were fearful that the Republican Party and antislavery attitudes more generally were on the rise in slave states...

Republicans flirting with secession today seem to be making similar calculations after witnessing traditionally conservative states like Georgia and Arizona fall to the Democrats in the 2020 election. Should Texas succumb next, it would become all but impossible for the GOP to win national elections.

There are cultural patterns here; in another Slate article Kreitner documents the long line of books and other artefacts either anticipating or describing either civil war or secession, up to and including Alex Garland’s recent film.

From a futures point of view, the structural demographics model of Peter Turchin, building on the work of Jack Goldstone, suggests that the stresses within the United States are now at their highest since the civil war. In a 2013 article, ‘Modeling Pressures Toward Political Instability’ he calculates (literally) the rise in the Political Stress Indicator [PSI] through to the late 2010s. He reviewed that forecast in a 2020 article, referenced on his website.

(Source: Peter Turchin)

In case that looks a bit abstract, Michael Tomasky at The New Republic can add some numbers:

Threats of political violence against members of Congress have skyrocketed. The Capitol Police investigated 902 such threats in 2016. That jumped up to 3,939 in 2017, and by 2021, the number was more than 9,600, or 10 times the number from just five years before. Hate crimes in 2022 hit 11,288, which is up from recent years (the number was 7,759 in 2020). Domestic terrorism is on the rise, with the preponderance coming from the political right.

As with the Limits of Growth, Turchin hopes that his modelling of the base case will help people take steps to avoid its outcomes, although there seems little hope of that.

And while I was writing this, I remembered that the best film about the American bicentennial, by some distance, is Robert Altman’s Nashville, which ends (spoilers) with someone being shot on stage at a political rally.

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2: Past, present, futures

I was at The Discovery of the Future conference in Trento last month, and there are some presentations from that which I need to write up here. One paper, by Blagovesta Nikolava (who is at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) challenged the pervasive view in futures work that the past is a problem. During her talk, for instance, she mentioned the way that Sohail Inayatullah’s Futures Triangle references “the weight of the past”:

What is holding us back, or getting in our way?

What are the barriers to change?

What are the deep structures that resist change?

In my current practice with the School of International Futures, where we like the simplicity of the Futures Triangle as an exploratory method, we change the questions about the past so that they are not uniformly negative. (“What inspiration can we find in the past? What narratives might constrain our thinking?”)

Her talk reminded me that I had written about this area for a publication after helping to facilitate a workshop on the future of museums. I’m republishing here my article, which was furst publishedn in 2010.

(The tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller in 1955. Seen here in situ in Goshka Macuga’s installation The Nature of the Beast. Source: The Whitechapel Gallery.)

What the future learns from the past

“When I say the word Future,
the first syllable is already a part of the past.”
(Wislawa Szymborska)

The purpose of futures work is to help us manage uncertainty, and by doing so, to improve the sharpness of our thinking and the clarity of our oganisational purpose. Good futures work is deeply embedded in an understanding of the past; the richer it is. and the more reflective, the better. As Michel Godet advises, in Creating Futures:

“We need to find the memory of the past to shed light upon the future”.

In curating the past, then, we are also opening windows into the future. In my work I often find myself building timelines, sometimes back to the 19th century, or earlier. But the quality of both the future and the past, and the way we choose to interpret each of these, is also important.

In her fine work on conceptualising the future, Barbara Adam has made an alliterative distinction between futures told, tamed, traded and transformed. The first pair refer to the oracular futures of the pre-industrial world, often embedded in notions of cyclic change. The second pair, in contrast, are versions of the futures produced by the era of modernity, informed by an assumption of progress, a world in which we can calculate our futures through the miracle of the actuarial sciences.

But old forms of knowledge are not destroyed by modernity; instead, they are pushed into the shadows. Part of the futures project, therefore, is to recover these different ways of making meaning. The notion of progress rips us from our contexts, and makes it necessary, literally, to re-place ourselves within them.

Applying this can seem hard, but it shouldn’t do. Sohail Inayatullah offers a useful model (opens pdf) in which past, present and future combine (and compete) to shape the future. The present is about the trends we see around us, and the future is built from our competing images of the coming age. The past helps us to understand both the continuities and the disruptions in our shared histories.

But the quality of the past is also important. It may seem a ‘weight’, as in the Futures Triangle, but weights have different qualities. They may be burdens, which we have to carry, or they may drag us down (one thinks of the climatic scene in the film The Piano). But weights can also be anchors which secure us and make sure that we don’t float away.

This interrogation of the past produces a second question, about the quality of the future—or futures—that exist in the past. Sohail Inayatullah writes of the ‘used future’, the secondhand future which is imported uncritically from another culture and another discourse. Asian cities, for example, have tended to follow the same pattern of urban development that western cities did generations ago, as if channelling the New York urban planner Robert Moses.

‘Legacy futures’, in contrast (the phrase is from Jamais Cascio) are ideas about the future which have been around so long that they have trapped us in their embrace, even though the ideas and metaphors which created them have all but vanished. The idea of the jet-pack may be satirised these days, but the world which made it, of unlimited energy and extensive personal freedom, still informs much public policy and a surprising amount of corporate planning.

And then there are the ‘ghost futures’, my addition to this trilogy, which have been dismissed from consideration because they haven’t yet emerged, but which, as the saying goes, may be “patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” Keynes‘ oft-derided prediction – actually about the year 2030 – that we may work for only 15 hours a week comes to mind.

As we say the word ‘future’, the syllables slide into the past. Yes: and as we speak, all of our pasts—social, cultural, linguistic, political—wrap themselves around the future.

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The workshop was held in the Whitechapel Gallery in London during its Guernica installation. One of the conditions of the exhibition was the the room could be used for meetings, as long as the public weren’t excluded and a record of the meeting was added to the Whitechapel Gallery archive.

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j2t#588

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