Crowds and Power

Events of the last week prompted me to finally take down from my shelf a volume I have kept there throughout the final months of the Trump administration, assuming its day would eventually come. And lo, it has: Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (Carol Stewart translation) has never felt more relevant. I am just shy of halfway through the book, but it is already clear—as I expected from its reputation—that Canetti's classic work seems to presage our time. It is impossible to turn to this volume in this week after January 6, 2021, and not see the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol foretold in its pages.

There is Canetti on the destructiveness of crowds: the impulse to break windows, to storm buildings, to smash plates—all attacks on the symbols of separateness and hierarchy within society (the need to "pull down established honour" being one of the well-known instincts of this mass, as Yeats says of "The Leaders of the Crowd"). Think of the pro-Trump mob carrying off the speaker's podium from the House of Representatives. Think of their desire to invade the inner sanctum of constitutional governance and halt the certification of the votes.  

Ironically, they were attacking democracy—the votes of all of us—but in their minds it was an act of score-settling with "elites" from whom they felt alienated—a great "reversal," in Canetti's terminology, in which they are now making the laws; they are now deciding for democracy; they have replaced the will of the people and the states that certified their electoral votes. It was an insurrection in the name of white supremacy, of disenfranchising millions of their fellow citizens, but in the moment its participants attain with one another a fictive equality—what Canetti sees as the ultimate attraction of every crowd. 

By invading their building and destroying their symbols, the mob reduced members of Congress to their own level. This accounts, in Canetti's telling, for the incredible sense of emotional release—the "discharge"—that seems to be inseparable from the genuine crowd experience. It is experienced in any mass event—including the most nonviolent and innocuous act of collective protest or march for justice—but it shows up as well in the particular (and particularly dangerous) crowd formation that we saw here—what Canetti calls the "baiting pack." 

This is the pack that organizes for the purpose of hunting down and destroying one victim—of asserting the equality of the members of the crowd with one another through the reduction of someone outside it to the level of an animal. Observers have remarked on the similarity in tone—the almost carnivalesque atmosphere—between the crowd of white supremacists who came to subvert democracy last Wednesday, and the white supremacist lynch mobs of former times. Indeed, the crowd that descended on the Capitol was a "baiting pack" in a quite literal sense—some came with the explicit intent to murder or kidnap members of Congress, and they chanted about how they planned to hang the Vice President...

One should also read Canetti on the fact that, however much power the crowd may hold in the moment over its victims, however much violence and damage it is able to inflict with impunity... it is also full all the time of a sense of collective grievance. The crowd feels deeply that it is being "persecuted," says Canetti, because it senses its own vulnerability. Individuals within it may leach out back into the mainstream of the public. Established authorities may wish to contain it—to end the deadly carnival. 

The crowd views this as the ultimate challenge. Observers have spoken of the incredible, strange "entitlement" the mob seemed to feel as it stormed the Capitol, and the kind of baffled fury with which they met the slightest resistance or check upon their will—surprised and outraged that police and others wouldn't simply let the mass sweep through and trash the halls of Congress unimpeded. 

There is Canetti on the fact that human groups, nations, and social movements often see themselves as an extension of a war party—a "war pack"—and that at the most primitive level what they desire is the indefinite growth and extension of the forces of their own side—an ever-larger crowd of their own—and, by the same token, the shrinking and decimation of the crowd of the enemy; the transformation of the enemy's crowd into no living crowd at all, but rather a "heap" of corpses. Think of Trump's obsession—his constant harping—on the size of his crowds relative to others—how his inauguration crowd was so big, his rallies were so big, so much bigger than others', etc. (and his willingness to invent false figures for both as needed).  

It is because a movement of this sort defines its success by the size of its crowd in comparison to those outside it, that anything that smacks of a limit on its crowd-size appears to them as the ultimate threat, the ultimate insult and attack on their collective being and identity. Canetti writes of how every movement preserves its own crowd symbols and will guard against their destruction. (For the Post-World War I Germans, that symbol was the army, Canetti claims, and he observes that the proscription of the army at the Treaty of Versailles was for many like the banning of their religion—a grievance that Hitler was then able endlessly to capitalize upon). 

Perhaps in this, we can gather some hint of the the origin of the strange politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why did the Trumpist extreme right—otherwise so often prey to messages of "contagion" and the threat from without—also decide to oppose the science of the virus, and to resist any efforts to protect even themselves from its ravages? It is because acknowledging the truth of the virus, and the importance of public health protocols to minimize its spread, would require limiting one's crowd-size in the most literal sense. No more mass gatherings; no more rallies. 

The persistence and rage with which Donald Trump has continued to hold such gatherings in the face of this science is a direct appeal to the crowd-symbols of his audience. As is, for that matter, his harping on the number of his Twitter followers and fans on other social media platforms. Here again, Canetti's concepts allow us to begin to fathom the bizarre and over-the-top reaction of the far-right to Twitter's decision to permanently suspend Trump's activities on the platform, due to his incitement of violence and sedition. Here again, we have a perceived attack on the group's crowd-symbols, a limiting of the crowd-size by which it feels its superiority over its purported rivals and enemies. 

Of course, there is one domain of our public life in which metaphorical crowd-size really does matter, really is decisive to the outcome—namely, the democratic process. Canetti writes that parliamentary or constitutional democracy—more specifically the tallying of votes in an election—is a kind of face-off between two crowds, who meet with one another at an appointed time to measure their respective size, as on a battlefield. There is one very crucial difference, however—Canetti writes—between the confrontation of crowds in a war, and the comparison of crowd-size by means of the ballot. 

In the first case, the result of the contest is decided by violence and bloodshed; in the second, there is mutual agreement to renounce the use of force. Why? Canetti theorizes that the threat of possible force is held implicit in parliamentary democracy. But by accurately tallying the votes, both sides can see for themselves which is the more numerous for the present, which has the advantage, which has superiority of numbers on its side. It can therefore take stock of its position and retire without bloodshed, to try to grow its own crowd-size in peace for the sake of the next contest; and so the process repeats itself, without at any point turning into actual war and killing. 

But the essential ingredient of this process, Canetti writes—the means by which it keeps from spilling out into violence and open war—is that all sides to the contest accept that the counting of the ballots was fundamentally fair and impartial. This counting of the votes must be held sacred and kept from interference by partisanship, if all sides are to trust that the result has been an accurate representation of their current strength in numbers. To deliberately try to sow doubt as to the process, to falsely claim greater numbers than one actually possesses, or to resort to similar measures, is to subvert the entire democratic procedure for managing the threat of violence. It is to risk reintroducing murder and civil war into the heart of politics. 

Thus, "[A]nyone who tampers with these figures," writes Canetti—referring to the final tally of the votes—anyone "who destroys or falsifies them, lets death in again without knowing it." (Stewart translation.) This is what Trump has done with his endless efforts to cast doubt and spread disinformation about the integrity of the election; in his repeated efforts to overturn the result; and ultimately and most heinously in his attempt to bully and intimidate a state official in Georgia to falsify the vote count and fraudulently declare Trump the winner. 

Trump has been taking aim at the thin and fragile band of legality that preserves us each election year from bloodshed and mayhem. In so doing, he was reintroducing the possibility of death and violence back into the body politic. And now, we are seeing the results.