Political Crisis or Political Collapse

Many of us feel that we no longer understand the political lives we are leading.  We are confused about whether we are living through a crisis in politics or the collapse of politics.  The difference between crisis and collapse is significant because they call for different responses.  In political crisis, our goal should be to achieve what we think is the right outcome.  In political collapse, our goal must be to rebuild the political community. 

Political communities share a common fate and make decisions about how to live together.  A social glue called solidarity holds political communities together, and the limits of this social glue define its boundaries.  While political communities exist at multiple overlapping levels—local, state, national, and international—a sense of solidarity defines what it means to be a member.  In essence, political communities stand together in solidarity, shoulder to shoulder, facing a shared future. 

How we deal with disagreement measures the health of our political communities.  In a healthy political community, disagreements are simply opposing ideas that contain no implicit threat.  In a crisis, disagreements become threatening.  Politics becomes a bitter contest of intense words and passionate arguments.  This intensity strains but does not break politics, because politics remains the best way to manage disagreement without violence.  In collapse, the political categories we use to understand and manage disagreement break down, and politics ceases to work. 

When political community collapses, we expect disagreements to harm us.  We feel, perhaps with justification, that our political opponents have become enemies who seek our destruction.  We stop trying to accommodate one another and instead seek to block each other’s aspirations.  Political debate seems pointless because we have stopped trying to accommodate one another.  The very notion of politics becomes meaningless.

In a crisis, politics can still work to solve difficult problems, even if it is severely strained. However, in a collapse, contests of force and coercion replace what we once called politics.  This distinction between crisis and collapse may seem too black or white when what we need is simply to find our way.  Nevertheless, it may help us think more clearly about what to do.  Politics is about give and take.  If give and take can’t manage our disagreements, we need to rebuild the political community that is the heart and soul of politics.