René Girard III: The American Crisis 2020

The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

“It is not the policies that generate opposition, it is the opposition that generates policies.”

-       René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel

An earnest student of Girard cannot help but be struck by how much the current political crisis in the United States resembles the dynamics of mimetic crisis, a central concept of Girard’s work.

To summarize, mimetic crisis is a state of social unrest characterized by all-versus-all resentment that threatens to break into chaotic violence. Mimesis is a dedicated term that describes a fundamental human act of imitation. The human animal is distinguished by intelligence, but this intelligence at a deeper level is but the capacity to imitate. Imitation allows us to learn and to adapt. It also creates for us models, or mediators: individuals who we look up to as someone who knows how to live the good life. We ultimately get too close to our models, and we become rivals with them. As we fight for the same objects of desire, the objects themselves fade in importance and we become gripped in a tragic struggle with our erstwhile models. Mimetic crisis occurs when this dynamic reaches a critical mass in spreading amongst members of a society.

René Girard describes the process of mimesis as contagious. What two people desire, soon a third person will desire also. Mimesis thus spreads through society like a virus and ultimately reaches proportions of a pandemic. The hallmark symptom of the disease is the widespread resentment of man against his neighbour. Given that mimesis is a fundamental aspect of humanity, it happens always and everywhere.

Another key feature of mimetic conflict is symmetry. As two rivals come closer and closer, as they begin to obsess with each other, they begin to increasingly resemble each other. There is an acceleration of back-and-forth insults. Initially slow rhythm of conflict begins to spin into blur and heat of passion. At its peak, the conflicting parties become monstrous twin brothers seeking to end their wrath by destroying one another.

Let’s now apply these ideas to USA in 2020. Police brutality and BLM protests. Trump vs Biden. Coronavirus pandemic. Economic recession. To be sure, they can be applied to many other countries, but we chose USA for the global stakes of its politics. And for its high theatricality.

It has become commonplace to say that the Democrats and Republicans represent a false alternative. In the light of mimetic theory this statement is exactly true, but it doesn’t go deep enough to uncover the root of the reason why. Some think that the two parties are in conspiracy and they only play out a public charade of opposition. Others see the political class as out of touch with the needs of the people and unable to perceive a true alternative that would save America.

However, if we have a mimetic crisis on our hands, none of these hypotheses are true. And I believe they are not. The hatred between Democrats and Republicans, both politicians and voters, is palpable. They struggle to control it, but they can’t. President Trump cannot get off Twitter. Talk show hosts cannot stop bashing Trump. The voters: they are busting each other’s heads on the streets of American cities.

Democrats and Republicans offer a false alternative because in their escalating rivalry they have become the battling twin brothers of archaic myth. Their conflict has degenerated discussion of differences to infantile bickering, while it transfigured them into two symmetric sides of one and the same monster. As in Greek tragedy, their exchanges of insults are accelerating in passion and in frequency, while the chorus of the American public watches on, voicing warnings of impeding calamity. Yet, as Girard explains, the chorus is in on the conflict too. Mimetic crisis is never about only two individuals. These are only picked out to be the dramatic representatives of a problem that has become a pandemic gripping the entire society. The chorus is not engaged directly in their argument, but it is watching with eyes wide open and waiting for a cathartic spilling of blood.

Girard at some point in his book Violence and the Sacred parallels aggression with sexuality. Both of these urges build up over time and reach a point of needing release. Both become more indiscriminate as they become more intense.

But before we get to how the crisis ends, let’s retract and ask: if Democrats and Republicans are rivals fighting over an object, what is the object? The modern, “rational” mind will jump to answer this question with a utilitarian answer. It will say that they are fighting over control in Washington and the many material advantages that this entails. However, this answer falls short because it doesn’t explain the passion of the voters. The voters are not liable to get any real control in Washington.

You may argue that some voters may get tax breaks while others might get free healthcare, or that many will vote for the interests of their ethnic block. It is true that there are different groups and different interests, but it is not their differences that are causing the conflict as we see it today. It is their approach towards a single object of exclusive possession that is causing the conflict. This object of desire signifies an exclusive state of elevated being. Furthermore, as the conflict heats up and takes over, the object itself loses focus and significance.

To see this erasure of differences, consider that even though there are many ethnic groups in the US, there are only two dominant political parties. The American voters may well have started off as differentiated, but the political conflict is erasing those differences and sucking them into a whirlwind of conflict that’s bringing them closer together in appearance. In Girard’s analysis, it’s always the erasure of differences that causes violence. As the twin brothers get closer in grips with each other, their conflict locks them into a tactless tornado of tit-for-tats that roams indiscriminately over the landscape, destroying edifices of culture.

You may again argue that the current American conflict is racial. In a sense it is, but what is it exactly about? Do we have here two different races fighting over limited resources for their genetic stock, as racialist pundits would have it? How, then, do we explain that the most bitter accusations of racism are levelled by whites against other whites? If the conflict is between two different and separate groups, why then do maligned blacks complain about not getting into the Ivey Leagues, country clubs, and corporate boardrooms? Are these not supposed to be white institutions of dominance? It is a curious and irrational phenomenon to want acceptance into the club of your very oppressors. It is a mimetic phenomenon.

To complete the symmetry of the racial conflict, there is at least one way in which whites mimetically engage blacks: music. It may seem a random thing in this context, but music carries within itself a whole dimension of human expression and existence that is by no means trivial. The entirety of modern music was originated by American blacks. Not only the US whites, but all nations have been imitating this music and thus approaching African Americans with the dynamics of mimetic rivalry and conflict.

Often perceived as next-level racial conflict, there is also the identity politics. There has been a proliferation of gender identities in the West in recent decades. Many are under the romantic delusion, to use Girard’s expression, that the new identities are fighting for rights for authentic and unique being. Yet, the curious proliferation in a very short time in the number of these identities suggest rather that they sprung from erasures of differences, or boundaries, characteristic of mimetic crisis. In the classic analysis of Freud, Girard, and others, the central taboos for maintaining a functional differentiation within a society are the related taboos of parricide and incest. They maintain the differentiation between parents and children that form the cellular basis of all differentiation in society, and therefore maintain prohibitions that keep conflict at bay. As mimetic desires spread out of control, they breach one boundary after another, eventually going after boundaries as basic as the biological distinctions between males and females. Everyone wants to be everything; everyone wants to be able to be anything. Thus, the proliferation of gender identities, rather than being a casting off of historic oppressions, constitutes a structuralist sign and symptom of mimetic crisis in its terminal stage.

That Democrats and Republicans are tragic twin-brothers rather than authentic and objective political alternatives is suggested in the very fact that there are only two of them. Indeed, in every country with the democratic system there are always essentially two dominant parties representing two exactly opposite points of view. It would be too much of a coincidence that all over the world, all citizens arrive at two exactly opposite political convictions based on rational calculations of personal self-interest. A more likely explanation is people arranging themselves into a symmetric face-off in the advanced stages of reciprocal mimesis.

If rational self-interest of differentiated groups was at stake in US politics, and if there was no mimetic rivalry, then the political process would consist of rational negotiation of differentiated interests. However, this is far from reality. The discourse of Democratic and Republican party is differentiated only superficially. The Democrats fight for the average American, but the Republicans also insist, with equal gusto, that they fight for the average American. Republicans fight for prosperity, but you cannot find a Democrat who is against prosperity. Even the concept of small government is essentially fought for by both parties. Republicans use that phrase explicitly, meaning small spending and taxes, while to Democrats small government means not letting big plutocrats control the country. Indeed, the seemingly quintessential American idea of small government is a universal human ideal. Yet, today’s Republicans fail to keep the government budget small, while today’s Democrats are backed by shadowy billionaires.

If one made a list of American “sacred cows” - freedom, equality, prosperity, and such - one could go through that list and confirm that every single one of them is equally sacred to Republicans and Democrats. It is in how to manifest these ideals that the two parties disagree. If we compare them to romantic rivals vying for one woman, this would be analogous to disagreeing on where she’d like to be taken for her birthday.

So, it is not because of irreconcilably different points of view that the Democrats and the Republicans are fighting. They are fighting over the one and the same thing, and that one thing has a name: The American Dream. The two rivals are fighting over the possession over this object, and at this late stage in the mimetic crisis the object has faded into second plan.

Pundits will often remark on this loss of the object. They talk about the rival’s obsession with each other rather than with goals. If we listen to speeches at political rallies, we will hear increasingly more insulting references to the speaker’s rival, and increasingly less references to political and social objectives. The objectives are barely debated in rational terms. They have been abstracted and absorbed into the sacred object of The American Dream, an object that is beyond judgement and beyond questioning. It is only to be protected from the rival. What is placed into judgement constantly is the rival’s claim on that object. Each rival is convinced that the other is unworthy of the object, or that they have nefarious intentions. Each rival is jealously trying to rescue the object from the other.

The atmospheric energy that fuels the hurricane of mimetic conflict is generated by the conviction of each of the twin rivals that they are different from the other. The storm rages as long as this conviction is maintained. Any recognition of resemblance would diffuse the storm. Unfortunately, the deeper the rivals are sucked into the conflict, the less likely they are to recognize their resemblance.

How then does the conflict end? Pent-up violence accumulates in society like charged particles in the clouds. It begins to floats around randomly, looking for some point of least resistance upon which to discharge itself like thunder. This point of least resistance will be the sacrificial victim. Through what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism, citizens in the pitch of resentment will increasingly neglect their rational capacities. They will look for anyone upon whom they can unleash their wrath. However, not everyone can serve that purpose. The victim cannot be someone who is in one of the conflicting camps, because any violence directed against them will merely be another salvo in the general tit-for-tat. It must be someone whose harm will not be retaliated. It must also be someone who is unanimously believed to be guilty.

Once this victim is found, the resentment floating in society and pointing in mutually-cancelling directions will align like a magnet upon this victim. The back-and-forth insults that only increased the pitch of the conflict can now be directed against a mute victim who cannot respond – at least not within the inner forum of the society that chooses it as the object of purifying violence. Finally, everyone can release their aggression upon this victim in one final act.

In archaic societies, argues René Girard, mimetic crises were resolved by literal murder of an arbitrary victim. Later, these murders were ritualized as sacrificial rites in order to manage the ever-recurring escalations of aggression induced by mimesis. However, modern times no longer have true sacrificial rituals. There are feasts and manifestations such as holidays or sports tournaments that are sacrificial in a removed sense. Being so removed and obscured, they no longer have the power to diffuse violence.

The Super Bowl is perhaps the most overt sacrificial ritual in the USA, and it has been able to diffuse mimetic aggression and produce unity. The Super Bowl always pays tribute to American military sacrifices, and of course it showcases the physical sacrifices of the players on the field. However, we have seen the mimetic crisis creep into the Super Bowl as well. As Girard would explain, the purifying violence of sacrifice has been mixed with the polluting violence of mimetic conflict. The unifying power of Super Bowl violence has been polluted with the divisive taking-the-knee phenomenon.

Where then is the sacrificial victim to be found for modern Americans? There have been some attempts to find the right goat for slaughter, but so far, they have all failed. The Democrats tries to blame Russians. The true import of the accusations of “the Russians” rigging the election was that Russians are the witches. They are the demonic outsider that has cast an evil spell upon American community. The accusations were not about several thousands of swayed votes. They were about an attack on the soul of America: the voting process. Acting in predictable twin-brother fashion, the Republicans then picked up the same accusation against Democrats and began accusing them of destroying or fabricating ballots.

Why didn’t the Russians work as a scapegoat? One reason may be that they are too distant and disengaged to be objects of American wrath. The Cold War is over; the Russians are not an imminent threat any longer, certainly not among the millennials, who do not have a living memory of the Cold War. Therefore, the collective and unanimous violence of America cannot be credibly organized against the Russians. There is nothing to push against. Another reason may be that “the Russians” have actually become a party in the conflict. Russians are kind of white nationalist, hawkish. This makes Russians kind of Republican. Thus, an aggression against Russians may be perceived by the Republicans as just another salvo in the mimetic conflict.

The Chinese are another candidate for the scapegoat. Unlike the Russians, they are today a real and imminent threat. Here, there is a solid obstacle against which Americans could push in unison. I believe that the reason why China has not quite made it yet is connected with the racism narrative in America. Anti-racism is another one of America’s sacred cows. If the USA begins its struggle against the Chinese, it must be in a way that makes it impossible to perceive the conflict as a racial war. Perhaps the US would have to elect some Asian-American leaders for this conflict. This would have precedent: they elected a black president with a Muslim background to disentangle them from Middle East wars.

Indeed, America cannot even engage in a “war of civilizations” anymore. Modern Western culture has reached a certain height of self-critique that makes it impossible to find an enemy. This brings us to the final piece of the puzzle in Girard’s mimetic theory, or at least the final one to be discussed in the essay.

René Girard argues that since the advent of Christianity the scapegoat mechanism of releasing societal violence has been busted open. The sacrificial victimhood of Jesus Christ brought a revelation that the sacrificial victim is innocent. This has brought great progress in opening our eyes to the injustice and senselessness of our violence and to the innocence of our victims. However, it has also created a problem. How are we to diffuse violence without a scapegoat? We could be true Christians, you will say, but even Christianity teaches us that this is really not possible.

This effect of Christianity on world history applies to all peoples and cultures. Those who are not Christian have been indirectly influenced by Christianity, which was the driving force and the “secret ingredient” behind the advent of modern age in the West.

We thus find ourselves in a brave new world that’s both good and bad. It’s good because we are more likely than ever before to recognize the innocence of the victim. We may not be completely immune, but it is becoming harder for the modern man to hate someone. A cultured American will find the idea of hating an ethnic group reprehensible if not absurd. Rather, in Western countries, the establishments are competing in their tolerance for “the other”.  The world has been turned up-side-down, with victimhood becoming a desirable status for which to compete.

In this reversal, Americans almost managed to find the suitable scapegoat in the racists. It showed great potential as the racist can never assume the role of the innocent victim. Yet, it too fails. In the days of widespread discrimination against blacks, the racist played the role of pointing the finger at blacks as sacrificial victims that healed mimetic crisis within white communities, and thus created unity within those communities. Blacks used to get lynched, literally. This sacrificial mechanism has lost most of its power as blacks have lost the criteria for being scapegoats. For one, they are no longer generally thought of as guilty. The national narrative absolves them of any guilt, real or imaginary. On the contrary, it perceives them as victims of slavery and discrimination. Secondly, blacks carry the threat of retaliation today that they did not possess before.

So what has happened to the racist? He has disappeared and cannot be found. Well, the man pointing the finger to the sacrificial victim is still there, and in that sense the racist is still here with us. However, he is not and cannot point it at a race of people in modern America. In fact, he doesn’t know where to point his finger. None of us know where to point the finger.

The bad thing about the scarcity of sacrificial victim is that it is becoming ever harder to resolve mimetic crises. The twin brothers continue to escalate their symmetric violence, sucking in with them not only an entire society of a country, but the entire global village. The stakes in the globalised world are higher than they have ever been, as is the number of participants. The effects of mimesis have been multiplied by information technology. Social networks have expanded our peer groups indefinitely, opening infinite frontiers for our envy and desire.

When thinking about how it will all end René Girard got into discussing the Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse. As for my prediction how the American crisis will end, I believe that the Apocalypse will not happen just yet. The world still has not exhausted its potential for unanimous violence towards a designated victim. America will find a scapegoat around which to unite. If it is not an enemy in a cold or hot war, it could be an abstract enemy to be defeated through a cause, that, unlike its current causes, is unifying and productive.

Read more in the book Catharses.