Confession time. I played role-playing games as a young man (if you define “young” as age 40). I know this confession doesn’t particularly sting any more, with a role-playing game like Warcraft rivaling the biggest entertainment properties in the world, and the techniques of role-playing games infiltrating sports in forms like fantasy football. Still, for most of my life, it would’ve been more embarrassing to be caught buying porn rather than a Monster Manual.
One of the grandfathers of the whole role-playing game genre—one that started the whole concept—was Traveller. Game Designers’ Workshop published Traveller back in 1977, just three years after the hugely-popular Dungeons and Dragons. It differed from D&D in almost every way, being a moderately hard science fiction universe, where, by default, the players ran a tramp cargo vessel, plying the routes between star systems and trying to keep a step ahead of debt and death by old age. Think Cowboy Bebop without the jazz, Firefly without the Western trappings.
Despite the differences between Dungeons and Dragons and Traveller, they shared one thing: The default Traveller universe was ruled by aristocracy, with a hereditary emperor at the top and a whole panoply of nobles stretching their way down across the galaxy.
Trump-as-chief-executive might keep the title “President,” but he will become Emperor in all other ways.
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In my youth, I thought the game designers did that to make role-playing easier by giving the players an easy-to-understand power structure. If the Lesser Poobah of Summersun gives you an order, you can understand his authorities, resources, and who to go to get him to rescind the order. When we actually get to the stars, I thought, we’ll go with the same ideological, rational bases for our society that covered the world in my youth—democracy, communism, or something like that.
And then, Donald Trump got elected president.
About 60 million of my fellow Americans welcomed an aristocratic, monarchical authoritarian into the White House. They welcome him flaunting the rules and decrying the “deep state” trying to bring him to justice. They think it’s okay for his political neophyte princess to have a say in running the country, for his sons to make deals with foreign powers to influence the election, and for his son-in-law (with no qualifications except bad real-estate deals, a purchased Harvard degree, and fucking the king’s daughter) to run pretty much every aspect of the U.S. government.
I’m worried that we’re a few months away from slipping from our flawed democracy to near-ideal empire, where the Trumps hand a title back and forth among themselves.
Trump-as-chief-executive might keep the title “President,” but he will become Emperor in all other ways.
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How can we slip so easily into an alien governmental system, though? For all the efforts of Mike Huckabee and Roy Moore, we aren’t really getting into theocracy, and I don’t think that we could accidentally start a Parliament without looking, as we’re now tripping into kingship.
Not to get to Freud, but it’s all about family. We can make sense of feudalism because most of us know what it’s like to have a parent and to listen to what they say. Or, for some of us, to have older siblings get first dibs on new shoes.
We know how to navigate family power structures, because most of us have had to do it.
That’s so many people love organized crime drama like The Sopranos. We have the criminal enterprise to give them power and danger to raise the stakes, and we don’t have to worry about any parliamentary procedure or voting blocs getting in the way of understanding why characters do things. We know why Paulie Walnuts and Fredo do things. We may have had brothers who did much the same on the playground or over Thanksgiving dinner.
Family lets us make ruling a country like doing our chores, and we can understand that. Pretty much every form of entertainment that deals with powerful people deals with powerful people exerting their power in family structures. That’s why we have Disney Princesses and not Disney First Daughters.
The only real popular exceptions to this serve to enforce the rule. Look at the Young Pope: he didn’t have a family, and it’s tough to say he was a father-figure to anyone, but he also explicitly turned away from the public. Just as his parents disappeared from his life, Pope Pius disappears from the public and relies on his alienation to give him power.
If popular media does portray officials in a democracy, they’re either in charge of a power-structure that’s already destroyed (Designated Survivor, Independence Day), they’re trying to destroy it themselves (House of Cards), or they’re charmingly befuddled by the whole process (Veep, Yes Mr. Prime Minister).
Democracy plays in the arts about as well as authoritarianism does in the real world. The exceptions are escapism of the sort that lets right-thinking people (liberals, given who produces most entertainment) say what they know is true to people who act like it’s false. The West Wing and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington are the exemplars here, and they’re not really about government. They’re about the ideals their protagonists hold, about the truths that the government should embody. They have to be in Washington, but aren’t of Washington.
The problem with understanding power as family is that family is inherently authoritarian.
Mothers and fathers really are stronger and smarter and more capable of handling the world than their kids, most of the time. And it’s a good thing for children to obey their parents, most of the time, since fire is hot and canyons are deep and bears are hungry. Part of the reason we fall into authoritarianism is that for much of our lives and for much of evolutionary history, authority kept us alive.
Of course, this authoritarianism is like breast milk: vital for keeping children alive, but messy and awkward when you try to feed it to adults.
We discarded authoritarian societies (for a brief shining moment, at least) because more egalitarian societies out-competed and out-grew them. Making a million Fords for every working man produces a better economy than handcrafting a dozen Rolls Royces for the ruling class. We have to stand against authoritarians because, in the end, even if they manage to make themselves richer than everyone around them, they’ll be far poorer than they would if they’d lost.
And that’s how we’ve slip-slided into authoritarianism: we’ve moved away from that egalitarian model in which everyone can afford a car. We’ve done it by reducing how much people pay for things, accepting that some people have to by off-brand while others fly in helicopters, gutting unions in the interest of charging at little as possible for our widgets.
By reducing the least of us, we’ve become authoritarian by degree. So looking for a king to sort things out feels all the more natural.
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