America’s Dual State
We’re all familiar with the boiling frog analogy, and its application to a society that is oblivious to the crisis that is threatening to devour them. Yet somehow, we find ourselves at a loss to explain why some of us seem to be living in a state of existential dread, while the others don’t seem to be bothered at all. It’s as if we’re living in two different states of reality.
In 1941, a Jewish lawyer, political scientist, and recent German immigrant to America named Ernst Fraenkel, published a book called “Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship.” Fraenkel had become a student of the Nazi regime, painstakingly documenting their systems, ideology, and legal framework before fleeing Germany in 1938 with his unfinished manuscript.
Fraenkel’s central thesis was that the Nazis had transformed Germany into something he called a dual state, with two realities seeming to operate independently of the other, but concurrently. He called the first reality, the Normative State, where everything felt normal, and people were protected by laws and courts, and life functioned as before. The other, he called the Prerogative State, which was governed entirely by the Party, outside of the rule of law, existing in an arbitrary state of violent oppression.
“The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism,” writes Aziz Huq for The Atlantic.
The insidiousness of the Dual State is that it was able to go unnoticed by a majority of the population until it was too late. In the Normative State, you experience the world continuing on just as before, until one day, you do something that upsets the Party, and suddenly discover that the laws and norms that protected you are no longer there. They’ve up and vanished, like a fart in the wind.
It’s like the Martin Niemöller poem, “First They Came,” a brutal critique of German intellectuals and clergy who turned a blind eye to the evils of the Nazis:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a CommunistThen they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a SocialistThen they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionistThen they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a JewThen they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
The Prerogative State always needs another example to keep the masses in line, and they are not particular. Their violence is arbitrary and capricious. It needs no reason, only its own prerogative to justify its actions. Their own Dear Leader claimed that the only check to his unlimited use of power was his own sense of absent morality.
Yesterday, it was the immigrants they came for, and we did nothing, because we weren’t undocumented immigrants. Today, they are shooting American mothers in the face and ICU nurses in the back, execution style, in broad daylight, on the streets of America, and still we somehow think it won’t happen to us.
You can just stay home, you tell yourself. You can keep your head down and quietly go about your business, hoping to avoid the ire of the authorities and their secret police. You can hide, you can escape the madness, if only you keep your mouth shut and remain silent. But they will come for you, without fail, because it had nothing to do with what you did or did not say or do.
You were simply next.
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