The Enshittification Of The State

We've all seen that services tend to get worse over time. You sign up to a new streaming service and it tends to get more and more expensive and content gets worse, or good content gets rarer. Or you try out a restaurant and it's great at first but becomes more and more mundane.

Some of this is almost certainly due to rising expectations and flawed memory. When you find something wonderful and new, you expect it to continue raising standards in a similar way to your initial experience, and when it doesn't, it feels like it's getting worse. But some of this so-called "enshittification" is definitely real. Amazon adding charges to removes ads from Prime isn't a false memory, and neither is shrinkflation. The rise of reality TV shows isn't, unfortunately, the result of an overactive imagination : some idiotic network executive had to actually choose to make it happen. 

I despise the term "enshittification" because it's fucking lazy, boring, and just a god-awful word. I prefer asymptotic degradation, because this is much more descriptive. Done correctly, from a purely business perspective, it would go like this. First, you set up a service which is really good so you attract new customers. You might even run it at a loss for a while, but no matter, you're getting people interested and enthusiastic. You're building loyalty. Then, you make cost savings by reducing quality or upping prices, or both. But the crucial bit is that you shouldn't do this linearly : if you do, eventually you'll reach a threshold when you start losing customers at such a rate that you become unprofitable and fail. The trick is to do this asymptotically, such that you get ever-closer to (but never actually reach) that failure point. Your service doesn't have to be as good as it was in the good old days, but it has to maintain a minimum standard to remain viable.

Or in other words, you try and cut back as much as you can get away with, but no more than that.

This Mother Jones essay looks at this from the perspective of the failing democratic state. The central claim is that would-be dictators in modern democracies don't go straight to usurping power and replacing themselves as strongmen, but instead undermine things little by little, as much as they can get away with. If that eventually means "everything", then so be it, but this is not likely to be how things start out.

It's a bit more sophisticated than that though. First, there's the concept literally of a dual state, or perhaps more accurately, state machinery applied in very different ways to different citizens. The two halves of this are the prerogative state, which means the ruler acts on a whim without reference to law or due process*, and the normative state in which law and order are – apparently – respected. 

* And nothing to do with Britney Spears, unfortunately.

The normative state might be genuine, or it might be a fig leaf. The dictator (or oligarchy) may simply not care about the majority of people and by and large simply leave them to get on with their lives; indeed, if they try to control too much too soon, people are not likely to tolerate that. But the masses will turn a blind eye to abuses of power – the prerogative state – being deployed against minorities. The existence of the rump normative state gives the leaders a clear advantage of plausible deniability, of having enough apparently intact institutions remaining to be able to pretend that everything is normal.

The problem is that the erosion of power in institutions makes the remaining adherence to law and state machinery ever more of an illusion, a convenience that can be reversed whenever the rulers require it. A true dual state is approaching not just when norms are disregarded – when penalties that should be enacted aren't – but when no explanation is given for the change : when the courts "forego with the business of law entirely".

A difficulty for such a dual state is its instability. 

Fraenkel thought of the prerogative state as something like a black hole: “It’s this void, but it’s a void that exerts a gravitational pull on everything around it. So there’s this constant distortion of what he calls the normative state. And there are these moments where some piece of the normative state just gets collapsed and blown away.”

The Republican appointed justices, to the extent the United States has become a dual state, would rather stave off such a collapse, not least because their legitimacy and power relies on such a mirage. Thus, they prefer a hidden authoritarianism to one that is out in the open. And more than anyone else, the justices are in the position to paper over Trump’s lawlessness or expose it. But this is precisely why the dual state is so dangerous: It allows the would-be autocrat to consolidate power under the cloak of democracy and norms.

An American president with authoritarian ambitions would be more likely to realize them if people thought their lives wouldn’t be affected. The Republican wing of the Supreme Court has a self-interest in a dual state as well; without the illusion of the normative state, the justices’ are revealed to be pawns, not power brokers. Their authority would evaporate because it is based on the perception of the rule of law. But maintaining a stable dual state means that the prerogative state must hold itself back, particularly in when it comes to the economy — the black hole cannot grow too large.

The difficult part is extrapolating how things proceed. Is it inevitable that such a state eventually collapses into full authoritarianism, or can this asymptotic degradation be maintained indefinitely ? 

One thing the article doesn't consider is that actually, it can even be reversed. Decline, even a limited one, is not inevitable. We've seen this in Britain and more dramatically in Hungary, which was as close to an authoritarian state as might be imagined. Sometimes, perhaps, maintaining a fig leaf – even when it's done for many years in the case of Hungary – is enough to allow authoritarianism to be undone. The popular claim that fascism is never removed peacefully is simply not correct, and in the case of authoritarian regimes more generally, this appears even more dubious. The tub-thumping rhetoric of pitchforks and torches is a classic appeal to the uncompromising simplicity of overthrowing the monster, the blood-pumping appeal of violence, whereas in fact it's peaceful protests that usually win the day.

But I would add that history never fully repeats. We can't take any previous patterns for granted because the situation is never quite the same; useful guidelines should be examined closely, but not taken as roadmaps to how things will definitely pan out. In America, as the article concentrates on, it would be democratically suicidal to ignore the abundant warning signs of the dual state; it would also be a self-fulfilling prophecy to pretend that nothing can be done about it. It is that belief, and only that belief, that decline and fall are inevitable that make them so. Hope needs must spring eternal.