I’m still trying to understand why the United States has taken such a hard, apparently sudden turn towards authoritarianism.
It’s not a new concern for anyone who’s been paying attention. Back in 2011, during Obama’s first term, I wrote about the rise of fascism in the United States. The context was Occupy Wall Street, a major protest against extreme wealth inequality. At the time I hypothesized that a right-wing reactionary movement was much more likely than any kind of leftist revolution. I pointed to trends like increased secret surveillance of private citizens, war profiteering, the use of prison camps and torture, scapegoating immigrants, and ever-increasing wealth inequality.
And shit, I was right.
The same year, I wrote a blog post entitled Four Types of Power. The idea was simple: divide the use of power according to two axes, creating four quadrants:
- coercive power (threat or use of violence or other harm, force, “power over”) vs. non-coercive power (creative/attractive/persuasive power, “power to”)
- zero-sum contexts (closed systems) vs. non-zero-sum contexts (open systems)
The model describes four quadrants of power. In a societal/geopolitical context, the four quadrants could be described as:
- Authoritative (coercive, closed systems)
- Extractive (coercive, open systems)
- Competitive (non-coercive, closed systems)
- Innovative (non-coercive, open systems)
My thinking has evolved since 2011. When I first conceived of this model, I had strong negative value judgements about the authoritative and extractive power quadrants. The most egregious abuses of power (like slavery and environmental destruction) certainly exist within these quadrants. But I’ve come to accept that any functioning society needs some use of authoritative and extractive power in order to survive. Like any liberal person with a decent amount of empathy, I’ve tried to consider if and how a society could function without the threat of violence against its own citizens. In 2013 I imagined something like a “citizenship score” could be an alternative to tossing people in jail. I was slightly horrified when the Chinese government implemented the Social Credit System the following year, not as an alternative to incarceration, but as more of a Black Mirror-like dystopian citizen surveillance program. But not totally dissimilar to my own idea, which made me question my own judgment.
