When political scientists offer you the choice between force and consent, the one you pick is supposed to be a foregone conclusion. Don’t you want to live in a state where the government solicits the consent of the governed rather than enforcing its will with violence? Of course you do, especially when the alternative is something like Stalin’s USSR or Nazi Germany.
The dark side of the dichotomy is that consent means something a little different from active support. You can consent for all kinds of reasons to things you don’t particularly like. I consented to having a nasty airport sandwich the other day because I was hungry and tired. Last night, I consented to having low-grade box wine with dinner because that was what was in the fridge.
When it comes to everyday consent, as those examples suggest, the bar is pretty low. Politically, it’s even lower, especially when “government,” as it does in any modern bureaucratic states, designates a much narrower corps of people than the citizenship as a whole. It’s not like Ancient Athens, where consenting to something means you might end up having to do the dirty work yourself. As evidence that he didn’t consent to the tyrannical rule of the thirty, Socrates points out that he refused to go arrest a man who was going to be executed. That’s not a defense that most of us are ever going to be able to offer, and the ones who could are so habituated to thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine that the idea of doing so would never cross their mind. We can even consent to war without, in most cases, it affecting us personally, while the culture of the US military makes following orders, regardless of how much or little sense they make, a matter of personal pride.
You can see, then, how a political culture in which consent is the only bar anyone’s trying to get over might be deeply corrosive to the democratic ethos. When their consent is what’s being appealed to, people learn not to expect better. As long as a policy debate (or an election) won’t cause unbearable harm to them personally, it’s not worth participating: they consent, so why bother?. To the proferred policy option, their response is not “yes” or “no” but “sure, whatever.”
None of this is news to either major party. For decades, they’ve been focused not on doing what most Americans want them to but on ensuring that the “sure, whatever” vote remains in the majority. Republicans have been more successful at this on the whole than Democrats have, because most Republican politicians are quietly racist and this gives them an intuitive sense of how to carve off the cares from the care-nots. In Republican rhetoric, “white” means “safe.” This is one sense in which Republican dog-whistle tactics have been a bit misunderstood: whatever the intent behind them, they work not so much because white Republican voters are sadists as because they reassure those voters that the harm is always going to befall someone else. When you get the consent, after all, the force has to go somewhere.
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America isn’t really a great alternative history: in some ways, all that’s jut a cover for another finely-felt childhood memoir about discovering masturbation. What Roth gets right, though, and what makes that book unsettlingly predictive, is the extent to which Americans will happily “consent” to all kinds of madness so long as it doesn’t hurt them personally. However true this was in the 1940’s, it’s definitely true now: white people don’t care about a little ethnic cleansing as long as the employment numbers stay good. After all, they’re not ethnic.
In Roth’s novel, and in real life these past two years, most people won’t come out and say they support ethnic cleansing – but they still want to “consent” to it, because that’s easier than the alternative. In Roth’s book and reality, this dilemma gets resolved through what properly alarmed observers have come to call “normalization,” where we pretend to believe whatever marginally constitutional justification our leaders offer for policies that clearly violate the bedrock principle of equality before the law. “Normalization” is a good term, but most people point it the wrong way. The goal isn’t so much to “normalize” unconscionable actions but to “normalize” ourselves as the kind of people who’d consent to them.
Meanwhile, the nation splits into subjects and objects of politics. The objects of politics are all the people it turned out Trump could slander and still get elected president. They have no control at all over what’s happening. To them, anything can (and will) be done. Agamben said this was where we were 20 years ago, and nobody believed him.
The subjects of politics have no control over what’s happening either, but at least they’re doing something – “consenting” – that can be described in the active voice. Republican politicians notionally are doing something, but, since that something is mostly about preserving the subject-object split by disenfranchising voters, ethnic cleansing and rewriting laws, our country ends up having the psychology of a genuine neurotic: it’s change you can’t believe in.
Our choice of consent over force (for ourselves, anyway) is supposed to make us feel safe. The problem is that consent is something for which you can be held accountable: ask the Germans, who, pace the Nazi state’s hallowed place as an example of a force-based regime, mostly consented to the murder of millions of their neighbors and haven’t yet been allowed to live it down. There’s an alternative to accepting guilt for what you’ve consented to, but it’s even more unpalatable. If Trump, in 2020, tells you what Pericles (with appreciably more justification) told the Athenians after a couple years of Peloponnesian Warring – “You’ve done too many horrible things to these people, they’ll never forgive you, so you have to keep fighting until they’re utterly defeated” – what’s your answer going to be?
Your answer can’t be that you voted for democrats, because that’s still consenting to the policies of a government in which democrats have no power. Your answer can be, for example, that you went to jail for protesting. That answer would imply that, when they offered you a choice between consent and force, you picked the other one.