Structure, Agency, Contingency: A Live Test
One More Pile of Dirt Shoveled Onto the Mound of Debate Recriminations
Let me first get this thought off my chest, working from my subtitle here: many of the pundits and party officials who are this morning saying “Well, how about that, Biden isn’t a great candidate, we should do something about that” are people who’ve spent nearly a year working over the public sphere with arguments about how Biden is a great president and he’s not old at all and he’s the best candidate imaginable and just about none of them are going to acknowledge that not only were they wrong but that they were enlisted in a coordinated effort to sell Biden as a candidate and foreclose any possibility of a competitive primary. They didn’t just have a bad opinion, they were part of an operation to sell that opinion as conventional wisdom. Bad products eventually win out over the best sales patter.
With that obligatory “We told you so” out of the way, let’s step back a bit and try to look at this moment in time the way that historians and other social scientists look at any moment that they regard as potentially contingent, that is, as a moment where multiple outcomes are possible and where those outcomes depend in part of what individuals and groups decide to do.
I’ve never lost my taste for the simplified, reified version of three scales of history associated particularly with the work of the historian Fernand Braudel: the longue duree, the conjunctural and the episodic. As some later interpretations have noted, Braudel’s (and his fellow Annales historians) strong preference for the longue duree, a centuries-long scale of history where continuity and structure predominate and human action is subordinate to material environments and forces, was at least partly a kind of withdrawal from the disorienting and contentious events and arguments of their own place and time, a belief that “this too will pass”—one reason that the Annales historians only seem “Marxist” in an abstract and theoretical sense, because many of them were in fact not very interested in questions of immediate praxis or in political mobilizations in their own historical moment.
I find that I have as strong a preference for the episodic, for the causal importance of events and specific decisions by people and groups, as Braudel did for the longue duree. But the value of that three-part division of scales of change-over-time is a reminder that some things only look like they’re subject to episodic scales of change, that they are far more structural than they appear, that in some matters, agency is almost wholly an illusion.
So let’s take the political week to come, from June 28th to the Friday hence, July 5th. Is there any chance that Joe Biden will decide to stand down as the nominee of his party and throw the Democratic convention open to select a new nominee? Is there the kind of agency in this political moment that can lead to contingency, to the real possibility of multiple outcomes? Was there contingency in how we got to this point in the first place?
Most commentary in the newspapers takes it for granted that there was agency, that Biden and his advisors seriously considered whether he should run or not, and that his political party was open to other outcomes. Therefore if those commenters advise him to step down now, they think that is in some sense actually possible. The two points are tied together, always. And much as there are three scales of historical change to think about, there are also multiple scales of agency to consider: Biden the individual, Biden the stand-in for a particular empowered group of advisors and political officials whose interests are entangled with Biden, Biden the embodiment of a political party, Biden the representative of a wider social coalition that identifies with the Democratic Party and liberal-centrist politics.
Thinking like a historian or anthropologist in this context doesn’t mean thinking objectively, but it does mean pushing against the conventional steering currents that answer questions like “Could Biden have chosen not to run, and can he still choose not to run” within the conventional wisdoms that suffuse the social networks that most historians and anthropologists are part of. It’s a hard ask. For example, news analysis in publications like the New York Times attests that Biden and his advisors had a serious discussion of whether to run, but that Biden himself decided he had to once he saw that Trump was running. The temptation is to just take that at face value. But in political systems and institutions that we are more distant from spatially and temporally, we can often see that people who occupy positions of power have to perform a reluctance to be powerful. With distance, you start opening new readings, you start seeing the archive of the present in relationship to more than just your own urgent hopes and needs. (But maybe you also come back to your urgent hopes with new understanding of them.)
So in compiling what seems structural in this moment, the most important observation might be that almost every existing liberal democratic nation-state is facing a strong resurgence of ethnonationalist sentiment that is closely tied to cultural resentment, and that the political balance in many nations is very nearly 50-50. Even where existing right-wing parties are on the ropes politically because of strong voter disapproval of previous administrations, as with the Conservatives in the UK, there is a strong party emerging to the right of the existing governing party. Considering the variations in many respects between all the nations where this pattern is discernible, that seems like an unmistakeable signal that there is something structurally common that is operating at a global scale. It might only be political systems following contours that are highly influenced by the history of Western Europe, but perhaps not—arguably something of the same pattern is visible even in nations that are not democratic at all.
The more weight you put on this underlying structural force, whatever it might be, the less that any episodic moment matters—a debate, a leader’s choice to call snap elections, Rishi Sunak leaving D-Day celebrations early. This is a hard way to think in the world of political punditry and social media, as they are relentlessly episodic. But it may also just be wrong, or that looking at political outcomes within existing systems is not where these deeper structural forces are really operating, that elections and parties are only a kind of tumultuous froth on top of some roiling stew where the heat source has nothing to do with any of the factors that come into view within conventional discussions.
But as I said, I think the episodic determines the structural more than the other way around, whether I’m studying the 18th Century or June 28, 2024. So how to think about those levels of causality in this moment? Before we get into the really individual questions, are there “conjuctural” issues to consider? For example, have debates actually determined what voters do? Are there actually voters in the United States whose votes are contingent at this point, or is the “swing voter” another one of those performative figurations that certain people are obliged to believe in? Here we’re considering not deep social forces, deep global-scale political economies, but the way voting as a sociopolitical act works in 21st Century American life. Here we’re in the house of political science—but it is a house with many rooms and many debates. And also, I hasten to add, a house where most of the rooms and most of the debates were flat out wrong in analyzing the 2016 election, and arguably at an earlier date failed to anticipate or understand some major shifts in American voting behavior that began to materialize in the 1990s. So here we have to consider the possibility that the contingency of what Biden and his people might do next is irrelevant, and perhaps has been irrelevant all along—that just within the context of the political sociology of the United States of the last 30 years, this election would turn out more or less the same regardless of debates or other actions, regardless of the candidates.
There’s another conjunctural level to consider as well: is it actually possible in terms of contemporary Democratic party structures and convention rules for a candidate who has received primary votes to simply quit before the convention, since the last time anything like that happened, the primary rules operated somewhat differently? Is there a chance that a candidate chosen by an open convention couldn’t get on the November ballot? The interaction between what people choose to do and the rules that institutions maintain does matter, even if rules have turned out to be considerably less powerful than procedural liberals commonly assume they are.
Moving on, what might be involved if we think that there really is something episodic here—that global politics is not heading towards some predetermined shift to the authoritarian and ethnonationalist, that neither party structures nor voter behavior mean there is less contingency here than we might hope? That Biden could potentially step down and that stepping down would matter to the end outcome, that an open convention and a new candidate could completely turn the whole thing around?
Trying to think from a distance, my first question would be Biden himself. Could he personally come to that decision? This is one of the hardest things to assess in any kind of social analysis, because there are epistemological limitations to the kind of material we tend to rely upon. You can have a mountain of archival evidence about a single person and they’re still going to be a mystery, for the same reason that we are mysteries to ourselves. I have the ultimate inside information about myself and yet I sometimes do things that I wouldn’t have predicted I would do, for reasons that are inaccessible to me. The current consensus in a lot of cognitive science is that many of my internal conscious explanations of my actions are post-facto stories. Certainly if I try to tell other people why I did something I’m translating, compressing, and likely censoring some of that internal monologue in accord with the reasons why I’m explaining myself. Technically, I suppose I can say that he could decide not to go forward. But the very fact that he ran in 2020 after a long political career that included other presidential runs says that this is a person who likes to have political power, has a fairly high opinion of his own capabilities, and would find it very difficult personally to stand down in a situation where that would have to be somewhat humiliating.
I can also consider the people around him. All modern U.S. Presidents are only the titular individual representative of a significant group of people who have power and influence in their own right, and the one thing that they share in common is that they are of necessity attached to “Biden” as a kind of corporate premise of their power and influence, the same way that a coup leader speaks for a junta or for the top military leadership, a CEO is tied to the particular C-suite they appointed, and so on. In a lot of cases where leaders might like to step down, they are strongly pressured not to do so by their staffs and close allies inside the government who will be losing their access to power and influence along with the leader. Would most of the people in a position to influence Biden think that the necessity of finding a better candidate outweighs the certainty of their personal loss of power in November either way, or would they prefer to roll the dice for the slender chance of winning out and staying?
I can consider the wider leadership of the Democratic Party, who might feel the same way specifically in the sense that their basic structural principle at the moment is seniority. Democrats in Congress don’t necessarily lose their leadership positions or their office if Biden steps down right now, but the oldest Democrats in the House and Senate might feel that if the main basis for stepping down is age, they’re going to be implicated in a move to step down. They might also be specifically afraid of or antagonistic towards the possible contenders who would step in as possibilities in an open convention, and again calculate that they’d rather ride out the storm of a Trump Administration than see Biden have to admit age-related weakness, and will thus advise accordingly.
There’s another thing here that I’d want to know about in order to read the possible contingencies in the moment, and that’s the culture of this White House and its proximate offices, particularly in how they acquire, consume and engage with information. One of the things that kind of drives me nuts about how some people think either about AI specifically or the “information age” generally is an idea that decision-makers in the leadership of institutions at all scales act on information and that the more information they have, the better the decisions are. I don’t think any of that is necessarily true. In fact, I think a fair amount of institutions, including markedly non-political civic institutions, spend as much time not knowing what they don’t want to know as they do trying to increase the quality and volume of information available to them. (I also think that more high-quality information doesn’t necessarily produce better decisions, but that’s a different epistemological horse to be ridden at another time.) In this case, what you’d want to know especially is whether information about the debate and reactions to it is available in a relatively unfiltered way inside the “rooms where it happens” or if that information is being softened, shaped, edited or amalgamated in meaningful ways, not just in the Oval Office but all around.
So is there an actual contingency here? I’m not trying to predict what would happen if that decision was made (though predictive conversations are surely part of the culture in the rooms where it happens), but simply whether it is even possible that this decision could be made.
Trying to maintain this sense of distance, I would say that yes, it’s possible, that there is a contingent moment here. But I also think there are both episodic and conjunctural reasons why it’s unlikely.
One of the basic problems I have with a broadly left-leaning way of reading modern sociopolitical power is that there’s a strong inclination to see power as having a transparent understanding of its own interests, a clear structural and episodic command of how to maintain power in that interested way, and thus a mostly rational kind of strategic response to challenges or threats that calls upon the advantages that power has both in terms of information and in terms of command authority over institutions (governmental and civic) and culture. That power does what power ought. In this reading, when dominant classes or elites lose power, when state regimes fall, when there is a major shift in the locus and distribution of power, that is taken to be almost necessarily about the irresistable force of structural change slamming into the immovable object of existing hierarchy or hegemony via some form of unavoidable contradiction. (A perspective that comes from Marxism, but I think is diffused into progressive thinking overall.)
Whereas I would argue that the powerful, in various factions and fractions, are actually as prone to making serious strategic and tactical mistakes as everybody else because they are as culture-bound as anyone else, as much a product of their own time and ideologies as anyone else. They do not see their own interests with greater transparency and perspicacity, they misjudge threats. That powerful people, interests and institutions sometimes fail to make contingent decisions that were entirely possible that would have prevented serious defeats. That power can, and sometimes does, commit inadvertent suicide.
Still, structure does matter. I am not sure there is any series of decisions that could have saved the ancien regime of Western Europe, though there were decisions that either intensified an inevitable transition into a revolution or spread it out and softened its impact on the former aristocrats or enabled many of them to move into new venues of economic and political authority.
So that is what I am wrestling with here: are we in the midst of a transition of that kind where the details matter less and it frankly doesn’t matter what the old liberal order puts up as a candidate or political platform? Or is this the more usual kind of landscape of shrewd decisions and avoidable blunders?
Here I give up any pretense of distance. I think we are in the terrain of avoidable blunders. Hence we are also looking at possible victories. A year ago, more favorably by far, that would have meant Biden quietly accepting lame duckitude and a vigorous primary to find a better candidate. Now it can only mean a very unusual leap into the unknown. Which might be the best hope we have.
I am trying to think if the commentators I’ve heard and read over the past 15 hours have understandings of the complexities of the present moment at the level of thought you are working with here…or are they obliged in their work spaces to seek simpler answers? And thereby, in the latter, constituting the discursive space that conditions the decisions that may be made? This is sort of structuralism within the episodic, maybe. In a different vein, if we or they believe that last night was a calamity, isn’t the question whether your deep, thoughtful, engaged commentary production can survive the results determined by last night’s debacle?
I recently read that Mitt Romney book, and in it Romney writes about how in 2012 he was convinced that Obama would destroy America and that he alone was called to save America. In retrospect he recognizes this as complete nonsense, but there's something about the process of seeking to be president that distorts your thinking. In Biden's case, Trump is genuinely going to destroy America, and there's a strong case to be made that Biden _is_ the only person who can beat him. Given that even people who are not Biden find it hard to come up with a slam-dunk winner against Trump, it would be shocking if Biden himself didn't think he was uniquely called to serve in this moment. I don't think that's hubris on his part, just human nature. Also, look at his own history--everyone was certain he wouldn't even get the nomination in 2020, but he stayed in and eventually won the election.