I wonder how this interacts with our crisis mode of governance. I can’t speak for the British or French examples, but in the United States at least in the 1800s our concept of crisis was radically more relaxed. For example, in the period leading up to the Civil War, there were a lot of fraudulent elections as a result of things like people from the Missouri Territory coming down as a militia and stuffing ballots in Kansas; for a while Pennsylvania had two legislatures with their own militias who were skirmishing constantly. All of this fell beneath the threshold of something the Federal government saw fit to take a hand in.
At least rhetorically we are prone to treat almost everything as some kind of crisis. I wonder about the degree to which governments operating in the modern media environment are hampered in their ability to recognize a crisis when it is upon them. If crisis recognition is hampered, I expect it to weaken this avenue, which seems to bode strictly ill.
I wonder how this interacts with our crisis mode of governance. I can’t speak for the British or French examples, but in the United States at least in the 1800s our concept of crisis was radically more relaxed. For example, in the period leading up to the Civil War, there were a lot of fraudulent elections as a result of things like people from the Missouri Territory coming down as a militia and stuffing ballots in Kansas; for a while Pennsylvania had two legislatures with their own militias who were skirmishing constantly. All of this fell beneath the threshold of something the Federal government saw fit to take a hand in.
At least rhetorically we are prone to treat almost everything as some kind of crisis. I wonder about the degree to which governments operating in the modern media environment are hampered in their ability to recognize a crisis when it is upon them. If crisis recognition is hampered, I expect it to weaken this avenue, which seems to bode strictly ill.