Power from the people, once again

The story of this era is that institutions with power aren’t using it or are only using it in their own (often misguided) defense. That leaves the fight for democracy to regular people, to aggregated individual power that is joined on a largely ad hoc basis rather than on an institutional one. 

It’s fair to ask why. Why are media outlets and elected officials and businesses so unwilling to use what they’ve accrued or inherited for the country’s collective defense? Is it a failure to recognize that defense is needed? Is it some sort of perceived or actual mismatch between the power they’ve built and the power that’s demanded? Is it just weakness or self-interest or greed?

It may be that anti-democratic actors understand how to muffle that kind of institutional power. Doing so has been a decades-long project, after all, one that has seen a lot of success. My last column at The Post centered on the long-term erosion of institutional power and the opportunity that provided Donald Trump.

But that idea wobbles when considering where institutional pushback has been effective. Power is power, and it matters more that it is expended than how. 

Luckily, aggregated individual power — and even just individual power — is also effective. The utility of ad hoc, internet-enabled groups has been obvious for at least 15 years. When I was writing my book, which looks at trends in power over time, I noted that these efforts are hindered in the long term by being ad hoc and not building the sort of organization that can let power accrue, to build metaphorical interest. 

To some extent, though, they did. The No Kings protests were organized, in part, by Indivisible, which grew out of ad hoc organization. But the long term doesn’t matter in the immediate term. Building power over the long term doesn’t matter if the long term itself is under threat. 

So we see people self-organizing in effective ways, in and for novel institutions. It is true that existing, expansive institutional power applied aggressively could shift the political terrain in the U.S. more rapidly; congressional Republicans could effect constraints on the president tomorrow, if they chose to. 

In lieu of that, though, there isn’t nothing. There are a lot of regular people doing relatively small things, making the implementation of an autocratic state that much more difficult. Past generations of Americans collectively built big, weighty institutions that have proved to often be honeypots for abuse. Without many of those tools at their disposal, Americans today are building new arsenals from scratch. 

When the monarchists are on the march, sometimes it falls to a random group of farmers to stand in their way. 

Photo: A picture I took as I realized I needed a picture.